It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.

Through a fence (mildly). Just off Sandy Bay Road. December 2011.

Just the one book this week, and not one in the holiday spirit. Time's Arrow is a rather controversial novel by Martin Amis from 1991. Essentially, the story recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in reverse chronology. That is, the narrator - some kind of disembodied secondary consciousness - together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse, with the central protagonist becoming younger and younger during the course of the novel. The narrator is not exactly the protagonist himself but somehow living within him, feeling his feelings but with no access to his thoughts no control over events and somehow experiencing everything in reverse.

Confused?

Obviously the point is to unsettle the reader as we confront the now familiar tale of the Holocaust (although familiarity does not itself entail understanding). Amis messes about with reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation which all contribute to the narrator's persistent misinterpretation of events.

In the reversed world, not only is chronology reversed (people 'die'/'are born'), become younger, and eventually become children, then babies, and then re-enter their mothers' wombs, where they finally cease to exist ('are born'/ 'die') but so is morality. Violences heals, doctors cause harm. Theft is donation. This is a confusing world, so when the protagonist reaches Auschwitz the world begins to make sense. Good is done. Doctors help. Indeed, a whole new race is created and healed.

I wouldn't say that the book is 100% successful, but it is an interesting attempt at looking at something that doesn't make much sense from a different angle. Mildly recommended.

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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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