This will hurt me...

Emu River. Fern Glade, Burnie. April 2013. Today's Sunday Top Five is a simple one: Five Things That *Particularly* Annoyed Me This Week! Large, belligerent girls in bus malls. People who smoke when they walk. Hipsters who can't handle their bicycles. Foul- mouthed bus travelers. People who think that they are asking questions when they are really making statements.

Poetry? Nanny Goats Lane, Battery Point. August, 2011. Some quickies today! #1 Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison Decent little WWI period piece that caused quite a stir on release in 1930. The frankness of a soldier's lot in (and out of) the trenches might seem familiar now, but no wonder it turned heads barely a decade after war's end. Recommended. #2 The Meeting at Telgte by Günter Grass Concept: the premier German-language poets decide to meet during the negotiations at the end of the Thirty Years War. At this meeting, the poets take turns reading their work for comment, the point being a desire not only for the end of military conflict, but a peace of language - that is, a standardising of their regional tongues. Verdict: Probably for linguists and poets only. #3 Room at the Top by John Braine One of the original Angry Young Men , Braine's debut is a fantastic portrait of a time, of a class-system, of gender politics, of personal c...

Home (to the left and upstairs) from mid-1996 until early-2002. Sandy Bay Road, Sandy Bay. July 2011. Two very different books this week. First up, Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 is an odd, dreamlike novel set in an imagined Austrian resort town at the beginning of the Second World War as groups of middle-class Jews arrive to spend another idyllic summer vacation at an annual arts festival. There is a fair whiff of Kafka in Appelfeld's restrained prose, and the incongruity of the characters’ struggle to maintain (simulate?) normality against the intimations of the approaching catastrophe. Although the reader has no choice but factor in the impending Holocaust as both the historical backdrop as well as its imaginative focus, the author deftly does so from surreptitiously and achieves a subtlety that you would think impossible. The awkward ignorance of what is to come for the vacationers dominates this book. Spring is in the air and summer is about to blossom as the vast rang...

A van full of money makes its way through Geilston Bay. April 2010. Some days you start work more tired than you left work the day before. Today is one of those days.