Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I: And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. St Johns Park, New Town. February 2011.

I’m ahead of the pace to knock over 85 books this year. With 15 down, I’ve only another 70 to go!

This week, what a pearler to begin with!

Despite all the awards she one (including the Nobel), and all of the esteem that she’s held, I’ve only just read my first Toni Morrison novel. I figured that if I was going to explore her oeuvre – oohh err missus – I’d go right back to where it started…

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. It covers a year in the life of a number of young black girls in against the backdrop of America's Midwest in the years following the Great Depression. Like a lot of stuff written in the late-1960s, the shifts about a number of characters, as well as a third-person, omniscient perspective. However, (unlike many novelists in the late-1960s) Morrison has the skill to pull it off effectively. In fact, her use is a great example of how such a device can aid in constructing a depth of characterisation rarely seen in such a challenging (in terms of subject matter) tale.

Without giving the game away, the novel explores ideas of ‘beauty’, particularly those that relate to racial characteristics, gender, race, deprivation, historical memory, the sexualisation of youth, and the determinants that shape individual’s character, choices and lives.

It’s a wonderful book, and one in which the author expertly (and seemingly effortlessly) recreates a world populated with rich characters so far from one’s own to a degree rarely seen. Even more so, she has avoided the clichéd exercise of the literary expression of ‘victim as martyr’ or ‘misery as entertainment’.

I could not possibly recommend it more highly.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell is a lovely, silent little novel. Telling a story from the American Midwest in the 1920s, it weaves a couple of interconnected stories in a wonderfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past.

It is a hard book to speak about without giving too much away, but I can heartily recommend it. The art of rendering a heartbreaking intimacy in such a subdued way has rarely been matched in my experience.

Read it!

The third this week also comes with some pedigree, Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam winning the 1998 Booker Prize. A good old fashioned morality tale, filled with moral choices, moral responsibilities, the decisions that are made and the consequences we face.

A world inhabited by a group of egotistical men connected by a shared lover (the funeral at the beginning). A newspaper editor struggling with turning his broadsheet into a tabloid, an eminent composer faced with the task of writing a ‘millennium symphony’ (three years early), an odious Foreign Secretary (and would be Prime Ministerial challenger) and an aloof millionaire widow.

A fine read that should be enjoyed by misanthropes the world over.

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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