No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

Birds on a pontoon, Tranmere in the background. Long Beach, Sandy Bay. June 2011.

Two very different books this week.

First, Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair centres on the development of an obsession that in many respects greatly resembles Death in Venice (which I only read for the first time earlier this year). There’s no doubt that the allusions to Thomas Mann’s classic text are quite deliberate.

Like Death in Venice, the story concerns an aging, widowed and renowned ‘high art’ British novelist/academic with classical tastes who is somewhat out of step with the modern world. By a chance of fate, he encounters the figure of a C-Grade teen Hollywood heartthrob. Instantly enraptured by the ‘innocent’ beauty of the lad, and quickly becomes obsessed with the young actor. The concepts that have driven our narrator's life - logic and reason - are ultimately set against a concept that he has up to this point only ever really known in a philosophical sense: passion.

The drama derives from the act and consequence of an individual driven to enter a world utterly foreign to him – trips to the cinema ( Hotpants College II), snipping out photographs of teenybopper magazines, the world of video rentals (Skid Marks and Tex-Mex completing the oeuvre of interest). The infatuation eventually compels a trip to the US to engender an improbable meeting. Like the trip to Venice in Mann's book, the obsession with a love that can never be fulfilled means that the trip is essentially one of destruction.

This might seem a farce, but the book is nothing of the sort. Beautifully and convincingly constructed, the story constantly drives towards a conclusion that can only end appallingly for all concerned. The desire of a young mediocre American actor baffles our protagonist, but the compulsion to be entwined with a source of something inherently desirable – beauty, youth, lost time, a new world – utterly entrances him.

What I love most about it is the gentleness in how it recognises that when our lives change, they do not always change for reasons that we understand or can control. Despite us knowing from the very start how this story will (must) end, the journey is worth it. Overall, it is an incredibly thoughtful, touching, and really very moving novel, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Second is one of the rare longer non-fiction works that I occasionally dip into. The reason why I chose A Short History of Finland is relatively simple: I find Finland very interesting. This book is a quick romp through the the historical development of the country from its settlement by the Finns in the first millennium AD to now, exploring their connection with Sweden, the relationship with Russia that has dominated more recent Finnish history, and the post-war achievements of the second republic.

The reason that Finland interests me is quite straightforward: it’s interesting! Think about it: a small nation with limited natural resources and on the periphery of global events somehow went from being a secessionist backwater – that could not even feed its own inhabitants – of the failing Russian empire at the beginning of the century; to emerge from a civil war at the birth of one’s nationhood; rebuild its economy in the centre of a global depression; then partake in not one but TWO destructive wars with an infinitely stronger neighbour; rebuild yet again in the context of a Cold War with the constraint (and opportunity) of living right next door to the Soviet Union and end up with perhaps the best educational system in the world and to be constantly ranked as one of the world's most peaceful, competitive and liveable countries.

That is the sort of tale that makes for an interesting short history! Recommended.

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

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...

This will hurt me...

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