A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

FISH! The Musical. Melbourne Aquarium. April 2011.

A very VERY busy week has seen me across the state and missing all sorts of opportunities (read: lunch breaks) to read. This has seen the measly return of just one completed novel. Thankfully, it was a good one.

The Member of the Wedding is another gem from Carson McCullers, author of last week’s review The Ballad of the Sad Café.

The tale of twelve-year-old Frankie Addams, who has reached that point of life when one feels disconnected. She has become – in her words – an "unjoined person". Set during the Second World War, Frankie is lost in a world of dreams (all far, far away from the small town in Georgia which she happens to live), she has detached herself from her friends, disconnected from her father (her mother died in at her birth), Frankie’s closest companions are the family's black maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her six-year-old cousin, John Henry.

It can be tricky territory, the ‘rite of passage’ novel of a tween, especially when it focuses on with the psychology of the three central characters and an evocation of the setting than it is with action. That said, McCullers pulls it off admirably. That said, this is not the usual ‘coming of age’ story, as there’s a degree of profundity, darkness, and socio-political depth to be found within the usual painful tale of the moment where one’s childhood innocence is brightened by through the illumination of adolescence before the eventual disillusion of adulthood.

As ever, the crushing of childhood dreams is rarely anything less than aching. This is really a very funny, very dark novel. It very casually and effectively weaves an exploration of gender as well as themes of racial and sexual identity into the narrative.

Any work whose emotional impact can transcend geography, age and gender like The Member of the Wedding is to be recommended. I think that you should read it.

Shark! The Interpretive Dance Spectalular. Melbourne Aquarium. April 2011.

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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