Lately I've been...

Writing
Or rather rewriting my book for young readers set during the Counter-Reformation.
(And clearly not writing on this blog)

Reading
Harry Potter again, from start to finish, because I saw a trailer for Half-Blood Prince and got a little too excited for my age.
Doctorow's The March - brilliant, of course, but not Ragtime. I know that's unfair, but that's what happens to people who write one of the great books of the 20th century.
Michael Dirda's Book by Book, which was a complete waste of my time, his publisher's ink, paper, and over-enthusiastic cover blurbs. Read like an undergraduate blog.

Watching
Tenko on DVD. Remember that?
The Lemon Tree

Waiting for
The Blessed premiere at the Melbourne Film Festival

Oh what a surprise

Take the Quiz here!

Birrarung

Woke up this morning to a sky of mist, all along the river valley, and now it's rolling in again.

Reading (not) Proust

So I finally got around to reading How Proust Can Change Your Life.
I know. I know. A decade later than everyone else. What's your point?
But I really never seem to be as impressed by Alain de Botton as other people. The Consolation of Philosophy was fine, so far as pop philosophy goes, but his self-referential style sometimes makes me squirm. I actively disliked The Art of Travel.
By the time we get to read the more recent releases (Status Anxiety, or whatever it was, and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work) there has been so much hype and endless exclusive interviews, there's little left to actually learn or absorb from his writing.
I don't get it.
If I'm in the mood for a quick dip I'd much rather read A C Grayling. Or the originals. Or even Monty Python ("Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle", from memory) which, let's face it, can provide just as much consolation in certain situations as Boethius.
Equally hilarious, albeit unintentionally, is Fromelles, by Patrick Lindsay. I'm alternating between reading it with glee and throwing it in a corner and trying to forget I ever started it.
And don't go accusing me of being unAustralian or spitting on the graves of our poor dead Digger ancestors. It's simply a poorly written book.
The only way to read it, I've decided, is to actively engage with its most maddening fault: that is, play Count the Cliche.
Pick a page - any page. Here are a few from a single paragraph on page 2, for example:
"two armies faced each other locked in a death struggle" (that might count as two)
"hunkered down"
"young men, brimming with promise and potential"
"show no outward fear, but their eyes betray them"
"the air is foul with cordite"
"you can feel it in your bones"
"moment of truth"
"pent-up kinetic energy"
"straining like dogs on the lead"
"count the minutes"
"taste of battle"
"invincibility of youth"
"prove his manhood"
And as a special bonus, that's all in randomly alternating first and second person.
Then there's a History Channel-style outline of World War 1, complete with the usual (and again cliched) outraged editorialising about Haig et al.
Oh it's fabulous.
I really wish I could get to the bit where they start researching and digging for what will no doubt be "the forgotten Anzacs". But I'm not sure I can last that long.

On track

Feeling motivated to finish/redraft my new novel for young readers: it's a kind of philosophers versus Inquisition adventure.
I've set myself a deadline. The fingers are tapping.

Mother's Day

It would be remiss of me not to link to this meditation on Mother's Day without a mother.
It's about my mother-in-law.

Recent reading: the good, the great, the bloody dreadful

The Maid of Buttermere, the first of Melvyn Bragg's novels I've read, begins as a fascinating pastoral - part Hardy, part riff on Sublime tourism (with which I'm a little obsessed) but then turns, quite consciously, into a kind of pseudo contemporary reportage. The concluding sections are not nearly as compelling as a result, and ... you know when you get that feeling that you can sense the author at work?

Notes From a Small Island, Bill Bryson's homage to Britain. It's not as hilarious as some of his work but I realised why I like him in spite of his many frustrating habits - he never talks to anyone. He travels all over Britain - well, bits, anyway - without any of that extrovert travel writer pallsy chat in the pub bollocks that makes the writer feel they truly understand a place in which they have just arrived and therefore able to convey its deepest secrets to the rest of us. I hate that. The other option of course is the Theroux misanthropic interaction with fellow travellers in order to describe them in scathing terms in a travel book. So Bryon's rare brushes with unavoidable conversationalists are refreshing, and it's actually quite a relief to travel around in his head and not pretend otherwise.

Sybil's Cave, Catherine Padmore's assured and evocative debut novel, set on the Hawkesbury, Fascist Italy and in post-war London, with all three places expressively and convincingly conveyed with a minimum of fuss and good strong characterisation. I look forward to her next.

Tales From A Broad. I list this only to warn you. It's by Fran Lebowitz. No, not that one, as it turns out. As I found out too late. Dreadful. Didn't even finish it. The kind of writer WHO HAS TO USE CAPITALS TO TELL YOU WHEN TO GET READY FOR SOMETHING FUNNY. How these things get printed is beyond me.

Elvin's Mottoes Revised. What a gem. Hours of endless entertainment. I've decided I need a motto. Who wouldn't, when you could use:
Mone sale (Advise with wit)
Optima revelatio stella (A star is the best revelation)
In utroque paratus (Prepared in either case)
And my favourite - picture the knight trembling behind his visor - Comitae quam viribus (By mildness rather than force)
Or even Bibe si sapis (Drink if you are wise).