This will hurt me...

So THAT explains how Jen smashed up the back of her car (to the extent that it was written off)!

He can't even reach the controls properly!

Funny fungi on a log. Tahune Air Walk, September 2010.

Sunday Top Five and I am struggling for motivation. Five Things That Might Possibly Help Spark Me Up:

1. Peace and quiet.


2. Well-behaved children.


3. Death to all clowns.


4. A dip in the ocean.


5. A third World War.
   

There are occasions whereby even the most level-headed amongst us must storm the barricades.

Spring in the Royal Botanical Gardens is just one of those occasions...

Well-fed seagull. Geilston Bay, October 2010.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions on an entire genus, but it seems to me that your average seagull looks decidedly shifty. In fairness, they sit closer to the ‘devious’ side of the spectrum, than they do the ‘deceitful’.

Perhaps they need a shift gleam in their eye in order to psych-out their opponents over a stray chip. Perhaps it is an indication of their intelligence?

Missing Persons, by Rae Armantrout

God and Mother
went the same way.

* * *

What's a person to us
but a contortion
of pressure ridges
palpable
long after she is gone?

* * *

A thin old man in blue jeans,
back arched, grimaces
at the freezer compartment.

* * *

Lying in the tub,
I'm telling them—

the missing persons—

that a discrepancy
is a pea

and I am a Princess.

I do like a nice bloom of flowers in the snow. Jen snapped Ezra here shifting some snow about in the hippy commune Hobart suburb of Fern Tree back in September.

Quite what he was intending to do with all that snow, well, that he wouldn’t tell me…

November moon, as seen in a backyard in Geilston Bay. November 2010.

Friday Book Club and a productive week of reading has just gone by. Three for three in terms of quality, although when you have the ninth all-time bestselling book ever published and a Nobel Prize winner’s most fondly remembered novel in the mix, you would hope so!

The first one to mention is Imre Kertész’s wonderful self-autobiographical novel Fatelessness. When he won the Nobel Prize in 2002, the committee noted that his writing “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". This is very much a theme in Fatelessness. Ostensibly the tale of a young Hungarian boy swept away from his life in Budapest through the changing fortunes of the Second World War.

Ethnically, the boy is a Jew; yet his family (bar an uncle) do not actually practise that religion. In this way, the notion of being persecuted – to the extent of Auschwitz – for something you are unsure of yourself underwrites an incredibly detached narrative tone that is at once disturbing as it is revealing. He writes in a bleakly matter-of-fact tone, and the vehicle of naïve teen convincingly establishes no sense of collective identity here.

In this way, the novel really does transcend the specific tragedy of the Hungarian Jews. Kertész recalls the iniquity of imposed difference through the eyes of a teenager caught up in a process he does not understand (if it could ever be understood). The boy drifts through the camps with simple curiosity: no matter what terrible things that he sees, everything seems reasonable because it is all he knows. In this way, the expected physical and mental degradation is established with cool detachment and the child simply accommodates to the new normality.

It recalls Kafka in the way the novel documents the madness of a system that draws people in, with no expectation of ‘explanation’ or ‘understanding’. This isn’t a book that Hollywood will snatch up and recreate, there’s no ‘moral’ (that’s the moral). What makes the story so genuinely poignant, as well as so utterly, radically unsentimental, is the contrast between the boy’s unqualified idealism – to the point of bemused detachment – and the reader's logical expectation of the opposite.

This is a book to read. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. Beware though, it will stay with you.

The second one finished this week is (I read) ninth on the all-time best seller list.The Little Prince was first published in 1943, and written by French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It has been translated into more than 190 languages and has sold more than 80 million copies.

Ostensibly a children's book – with illustrations drawn by Exupéry – The Little Prince offers a little bit more than your usual edition of Grug. It’s an intensely philosophical book, and one peppered with observations about life and human nature. I won’t go into any more detail, other than to recommend you read it (and take note of what the fox has to say for himself).

It is a quick read, but beware, you’ll be thinking about it afterward!

Finally, I finished up with a collection of short stories by German author Bernhard Schlink. Schlink is most famous for The Reader (a book that both Oprah Winfrey and I enjoyed), and Flights of Love recalls Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, in that each story explores the notion of ‘love’.

As much as ‘love’ is the central theme, masculine identity, modern Germany and how one copes with change are all recurring ideas through the separate narratives. A step down from the other two books, I would still recommend this to readers. The worst that I can say about it is that some of the stories seem as much set pieces to explore separate philosophical treatise with unifying themes, but Schlink is good enough to ensure that the discussion is still worth reading.

So all in all, a good week’s reading. I’m a good way through the lovely little Mercedes-Benz by Pawel Huelle at the moment, so it looks like I’m on a streak!

He is back in Tasmania!!!




Now what?

Blogs are everywhere. Campbell Street, Hobart CBD, October 2010.

Theme Thursday yet again and this week I wanted to talk about the current touch football season.

Now, I could bore you with vivid descriptions of our SOMNOLENT defensive line (or lack thereof), but I wouldn’t want to bore you with clichés.

I could talk to you about the myriad of injuries incurred in what is supposed to be a non-contact sport – game one = sore shoulder, game two = bruised thigh, game three = jarred knee – but I won’t.

I won’t lie to you: we’re struggling. Zero and three three rounds in, we remain [mathematically] still in contention for the finals.

We’re taking it one week at a time. There is no point getting ahead of ourselves, but (like the boy with the barrow), there is a big job in front of us. The reality is that we have had a number of injuries to senior players (my long list, a broken finger, back spasms, bruised egos), but we are looking at it as a chance for the kids to step up.

Despite the results, the coach has the full support of the board. We have all heard the rumours of friction in the dressing room, but at the end of the day, it is a team sport, and even if there is no I in TEAM, there is A ME. The other teams have just wanted it more. We are better than our record indicates, but we do need a result. We miss out again, he’s a dead man walking.

In many ways the team is in a in a rebuilding phase, in terms of the premiership clock, we are around the upper right quadrant. That said, we have a number of determined players, but the turnovers really hurt us.

It is a game of two halves, unfortunately, at the moment we are playing both equally badly. Although we’re still in with a shout, we are not getting ahead of ourselves and thinking finals, we’re focusing on next week.

We need to cut the costly errors, play a full 60 minutes, work on our fitness and get back to basics, work on the fundamentals and stop playing like millionaires. We need to take our chances, find another gear, get out there and have a red hot go. If we don’t, it’s guaranteed to end in tears.

If we get out there next week, give it 120%, I reckon that the next match can be a great advert for the game. At this level – Southern Touch Mixed Division Seven – there are no easy games. We have it all to play for, and although the opposition look good on paper, the game is not played on paper and touch is a funny old game.

It’s all to play for. If we want to be in with a shout, the guys have to put their bodies on the line, win the one percenters, take centre stage and provide the spark that lights the touchstone, let's us grind out a result and get our season off the ground. It’s a real battle for survival, and weed to get out there, take no prisoners and take the game by the scruff of the neck.

Time to draw a line in the SAND. I know that the opposition coach has been talking a good game, but one day the chickens will come home to roost. We are at the business end of the season and we’re not going to throw the towel in. If we win this one, we are in the hunt. We lose, and we’re in free fall and the knives will be out.

Although the odds are decidedly against it, Ezra is already considering building his portfolio of portraits that might be used in forthcoming American Presidential election campaigns.

From the outside, we’re aware that US campaigns require a few essentials (no, nothing silly like ‘policies’ or ‘consistent moral or ethical principles’). We need glossy photos, neat hair, a nice smile, and lots (LOTS) of money. So far, we have three of the necessary requirements, but we’re struggling on the fourth.

The trick that we haven’t quite figured is, how can you possibly raise that much bread without compromising principles?

No, I’m not sure it’s possible either…

Somebody isn't paying attention. Expensive apartment block, Wapping. Hobart, October 2010.

I cannot speak for you, but my whole family and I find that time spent browsing the brochures one of life’s joys. Oh what joy can be had in casting witty and urbane bon mots about things that we will never want or need!

The casual ease with which the mountains of catalogues can be SNIP SNIP SNIPPED! away in dedicated training sessions with the scissors. Indeed, as a very small fellow (still in the rolling phase), Henry used to EAT the junk mail. If I remember it correct, the Harvey Norman furniture (vintage ’07) was his favourite.

Whatever the case, the complex above may well not accept junk mail, but it’s certainly getting it.

I've got Hen and Ez hitting the nets pretty hard in advance of the Ashes series. My hope is that one of the two might stand a chance at getting a run as spinners by about test three.

Surely if the mugs they keep sending out can get picked, these two deserve a chance!

Whatever happened the these "typewriter" thingies?

You used to see them around the place, but not so much these days. Where are they? Where have the gone?

Don't people realise that innocent little children need them?!?

Won't somebody think of the children!!!

The make power poles from concrete too. East Derwent Highway, Geilston Bay, October 2010.

My beautiful babies, and my beautiful and sexy wife, are all now at the airport awaiting a flight to that filthy city of sin: Sydney. It will be a whirlwind visit, but nonetheless I shall be without their company for the best part of THREE DAYS and TWO NIGHTS!

As would be expected, I am at a loss. Stricken, heartbroken and utterly forlorn, all that I have for company is this here power pole.

There is little finer than having a nice old sit down at the end of a long walk.

Sure, a spa, foot rub and piping hot mug of gluhwein would have been nice, but easy going chap that he is, Ezra was content with a hard wooden bench.

I sense a pattern. The nouveau riche area of Wapping, Hobart, October 2010.

I have already railed before about the gentrification of the areas of what were formally slums here in Hobart. Primarily, these areas were those that previously housed the various destitutes, waifs, beggars, prostitutes and cocktail waitresses that seem to surround working docks. When the work at the docks dry up, all that are left are the slums. Eventually – after a period of mass forgetting – those with the bread to spare force out the toothless grannies left, bulldoze the filth and shift in their high-rise apartments, underground parking and diamond-studded collar wearing Pekinese.

What I want to know is, as I suspect, this a universal phenomenon? Dear readers, have your cities experienced similar ‘urban regeneration’? How has is worked out?