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Beetlemania #1. Bellerive Beach, August 2011.

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene is essentially a book about unhappiness. Like most of Greene's great novels, it pursues one man's journey through a series of moral dilemmas as the 'righteous' are tested. Oh how they are tested!

The character of Henry Scobie is probably Greene's greatest creations, a British colonial police officer stationed in some backwater West African town during World War Two. A Catholic, Scobie is indeed a righteous man who pays (in spades) for that trait.

Happiness, duty, pity and piety beguile Scobie as he journeys down a path that willingly secures his own eternal damnation (while we watch). Indeed, any tale whereby damnation is assured through and excess of compassion is bound to be an interesting one. To add to the uplifting tone, the book is also about failure: failure to love, failure to be loved, failure to communicate, failure to please, failure to protect; indeed, Scobie's ultimate sacrifice itself ends in failure.

This is a book that kicks you in the shin, offers a hand, then punches you in the face. It then offers you another hand up, helps dust you off and then hits you with a cast iron frying pan. Then it helps you up again only to kick you in the stomach and drop a microwave on your head. The it tells you, "okay enough now" and slowly walks away, only to spin around and give you one last kick in the head.

Crikey it is a magnificent bit of work. Absolutely recommended.

Beetlemania #2. Bellerive Beach, August 2011.

Comments

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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