“You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.”

Jen looks out to sea. Binalong Bay, Bay of Fires, Tasmania. July 2021.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Catch-22 is one of the rare books that I have returned to and re-read several times throughout my life. The first time was as a young and impressionable 17-year-old, and I delighted in the confidence Heller displayed in flourishing his love of language and deployment of marvellous words. After reading the novel, I am sure that I was willing to open up and use the full vocabulary available to me under the English language (and a few others to boot). It was darkly funny, and I took delight in the absurd wordplay and ingenious structure.

The second time I read it, I was in my mid-20s and neck-deep working in a large, bureaucratic institution (a university). The complexities and absurdities that didn't strike me during my first read suddenly had more resonance. I came to appreciate the author's skill and cunning in replaying the same incidents repeatedly and the art beneath the nonsense. It struck me as a more sombre book, and the idiocy of events seemed more clownish than before.

The third time around, I'm in my thirties and have a couple of babies about the house. That might explain why I can't quite recall much about it because I was likely so very, very tired. Still, the violence - particularly the casual and sexual nature to it - hit harder, and I think that I finally could connect the flippancy around rape with the ever-present nearness of death. The fear was more palpable than earlier readings.

This time around, I am wearied by nearly a decade in a bureaucracy even larger than a university (a state government). I'm also the father of a couple of teenage boys. I still love the book, perhaps even more than before. I am likely more attuned to some of the details than earlier and am a little less inclined towards that ornamentation of language than previously. I have a decade more of reading that I'd like to think has sharpened my tastes. Overwhelming though, the laughs aside, it strikes me as a far more melancholic novel than it did in my youth.

Despite everything that happens, the existential anguish of Yossarian's plight had not struck me with the force it did this time around. I feel the agony of the chaplain, the torment of poor old Major Major Major Major and Chief White Halfoat's sorrow affected me far deeper than previous readings.

Similarly, the innate heroism of Orr stands out in a way that I'd not noticed before. From this vantage point, Doc Daneeka becomes a far darker figure and Cathcart and Corn have faces to them now quite different to I'd experienced prior to my time in Weber's stahlhartes Gehäuse.

Then we have Snowden. Poor Snowden. Snowden was always tragic, but this time around the death of Snowden hit in a profoundly different way that helps me understand Yossarian's dread in a far more intense way than before. Clevinger remains Clevinger, but by golly, this time around, I finally started to feel sorry for the poor bastard!

All up. I love this book. I don't do "favourites" but if you're holding a gun to my head this is on the shortlist in the rolladex in my head. It is such a funny, dark, mournful, bitter, bleak, optimistic, tender, jagged work in ways so original that it defies easy categorisation.

I can't wait to read it again in my fifties.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ (Six stars you say? That's because of the catch. You know which catch.)

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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