Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

Dune. No sign of David Lynch anywhere. Calverts Beach, South Arm Peninsula, February 2011.

Friday Book Club!

Book # 1: A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir

A Very Easy Death is an interesting reflection on a depressing set of circumstances – the death of her elderly mother to cancer – and de Beauvoir makes a number of really good points; but the detached tone and emphasis on herself can’t help me but think that on the whole it does seem a little self-indulgent. As an exercise in recording the process of hospitalised death for the French middle class in the 1960s, I guess it captures it well enough. The very last chapter somewhat redeemed it as a work though.

Only for the really interested.

Book # 2: A Meeting by the River, Christopher Isherwood

I’d not actually read any Isherwood up to this point, but was aware of his reputation. A Meeting by the River was his last novel and it explores the ambiguities inherent in sexuality, religious devotion, and sibling relationships. The story is constructed from the letters and diary entries of a pair of brothers, and features enough twists and turns to keep you hooked.

To be frank, in terms of characterisation, everyone bar the Oliver and Tom – the brothers – is one dimensional. That is always a risk in this kind of narrative construction, and where people might be right in bemoaning the crude representation of the usual suspects – ‘Mother’, ‘Wife’, [invisible] ‘children’ and ‘boy lover’ – I do think that the last third of the book manages to just about pull it off.

Worth a look.

Comments

Kris McCracken said…

Non un commento?

Scandaloso!

1 April 2011 at 14:28

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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