This will hurt me...

Heading home. Elizabeth Street, as viewed from the pier. June 2011. Three books this week and the strike rate has not been pretty. First up is Finnish author Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot . The critical reaction seems to be very favourable, and I must admit that I’m struggling to see why. The story of damaged people and damaged families, and the harm that they inevitably do to each other; it utilises a fractured narrative to exemplify the ‘brokenness’ of the central characters. In this sense, this is not a subtle book. In broad brush strokes it ties together the idea of memory with the reality of unfortunate childhood(s), mental illness, relationship failures and even the linkage between personal and familial dysfunction and national identity and loss. I dunno, some described this book as "potent, fragile, and tender" but the words “ self-indulgent ,” “ overwrought ,” “ confusing ,” and “ narcissistic ” more readily come to mind. Not recommended. Speaking of na...

What are they doing in there? 10 Murray Street at night. Hobart. July 2011. I like e.e. as I like 10 Murray: with intensity . However, if a poet were a building e.e. would be anything but a brutalist bureaucratic block. the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls , by E. E. Cummings the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things— at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D .... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy