Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.

Cat. Theatre Royal car park, Campbell Street, Hobart. September 2013.

Sunday Book Club? That's right, SUNDAY Book Club!

Great Granny Webster, Caroline Blackwood: What an odd little book. Essentially a psychological analysis of how one person (in this case the obdurate matriarch of a clan) can inflict emotional damage across generations. The titular Great Granny is stuck in the "correctness" of her own Victorian youth. Her daughter is driven mad and talks to the fairies. Her granddaughter parties all night, smokes all day, and parties obsessively. She also constantly attempts suicide. Deceptively concise, this one is a sleeper. Recommended. B.

Strangers on the 16:02, Priya Basil: A short novel, this reads more like synopsis for a new novel than a complete work. Painted in broad strokes, it does a reasonable job in constructing three very different characters, reaching a climax between the three, then it ends. Frustrating. C-.

I, Claudius, Robert Graves: Romans had different ideas about family and politics than modern people. For example, in this historical novel, I lost track of how many of the main and secondary characters had been taken out by poisoning, bludgeoning, or neglect. Mothers kill their daughters by walling them up in a room and listening to them starve to death, grandmothers gradually poisoning grandsons, and emperors get their jaws hacked off by assassins. Rank, kinship or success didn't seem to protect Romans from an inevitable and unnatural death. Riveting. B.

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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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