Lately I've been

Listening to...
Amy Winehouse (fabulous, and made me dig out my old Etta James cassette - yes, I said cassette, which just shows you how old it is. And that was a reissue.)
Cat Empire (still not sure whether or not I love it)

Reading...
Geraldine Brooks' new novel, The People of the Book. It's not as brilliant as March nor as compelling as The Year of Wonders. The voices aren't as strong, and they are, after all, her forte. But she's still my current hero.
(Next up, Anne Enright's The Gathering)

Writing...
A little. Not enough.

Eating...
A gazillion tomatoes from the garden. Best ever.

History in the making

A big week.
The first week in Parliament for our new government and we're off with a bang, with the extraordinary and intensely emotional apology to the Stolen Generations.
I watched it on the big screen in one of the public spaces at work, with about 100 other staff, bawled my eyes out and will never forget it.
Will never forget, either, these years of shame and anger under Howard; his hectoring of the reconciliation convention; that march across the Harbour Bridge and the apology written across the sky.
Mind you, I did think the apology was supposed to be about much more: about colonisation and dispossession and two centuries of squalid treatment. But let's not quibble just now.
May never forgive Brendan Nelson for attempting to diminish the impact of the words. Tosser.
(That's my level of politicial engagement nowadays - which makes me realise that blogging is little more than an online form of shouting at the telly.)
Perhaps one day our collective gaze will grow wide enough to take in the detention centres, the other great source of shame and international embarrassment.

Writing

It doesn't start with the blank page anymore.
It starts with File/New.
But the feeling is still kinda nice.
Although fresh stationery will never lose its appeal. I still need a new notebook for a new project. Even if I then randomly scribble in any notebook I can find.

Bad, bad blogger

Yes, I know. I've been neglectful.
I could promise to be a better blogger from this day forward but frankly I'm not sure whether I can live up to any New Year's resolutions of any kind.
I simply must write another book or two this year. That's the main goal. I have a couple on the way and I've barely glanced at them for months. So I won't make any grand pronouncements today, as I have in the past, about turning over new leaves or sharpening pencils.
After all there a million things I need to do at the same time as writing books. Or, conversely, there are a million things that suck out my brains and leave me no time or headspace for writing books. These range from having a day job which was supposed to be stress-free but isn't, to doing the washing.
Somewhere in amongst it all are a couple of stories trying pathetically to come out of the darkness and onto the weird backlit stage of the laptop. Via my mind.
A rocky road at the best of times.
At any rate lately I've been doing a raft of things rather than write books, such as building a garden (well, at present it's more about tearing apart an old one - I keep hoping to come across Mary Lennox and Dickon behind a wall of ivy), and staring absently-mindedly into the air.
I suppose something will come of that one day.
Right now there's a sulphur-crested cockatoo on the window sill, so I might watch him eat cherry plums. Instead of writing a book. Or blogging.

The tribe has spoken

I was a bit sad that my pirate books didn't get on the list for the Premier's Reading Challenge here in Victoria, since every other kids' book known to humanity seems to be on there. Maybe next year.
But I just discovered by accident that Ocean Without End was on the list in South Australia, where clearly dwell some sensible people of exquisite taste.
I'm even more chuffed to find that it was been selected by young readers in Western Australia to be on their 2007 WAYRBA book awards list.
And then you see a review from a young reader like this one, and it's all worth it.

Lit crit(ical)

As we breathlessly wait for word on whether my home town has been accorded the official label of City of Literature, The Age has run a timely editorial on that idea, and its flipside – the need for greater focus on reader development and literacy.

In Melbourne, a city of many readers and many dogs, the light of literature has shone strongly and steadily throughout its history as a beacon of knowledge, enlightenment and ideas, illuminating where we have been, where we are and where we are going. There are more bookshops in Melbourne than in any other Australian city, and there are more books, magazines and newspapers sold in Victoria than in any other state or territory. This city has a proud and honourable tradition of fostering fine publishing…
The pleasure of reading, something once taken for granted in the best sense of the phrase, has become harder to achieve; in the age of email and text messaging and other forms of instant gratification, reading a book takes time and space in a hectic world full of distractions. Literature is slow food versus the take-away chook leg…
If reading comes down to basic skills, so too does language. Spelling, punctuation and elementary grammar skills are as essential to the written word as clarity and accuracy. Yet all too often it is blighted by the nomadic apostrophe, the spelling mistake, the dangling participle. These may be mere rivets in a superstructure, but without them, the edifice crumbles. For a city of literature, literacy in all its forms can never be ignored.

And so say all of us.

Lately I've been...

Reading
Geraldine Brook's The Year of Wonders (she's my new hero)
Sally Vickers' Miss Garnet's Angel (she's not)
Next up is A C Grayling's Enlightenment tome, Toward the Light. I'm becoming more of an unreconstructed Enlightenment product the older I get and the madder the world becomes.

Watching
The kitten climb the Christmas tree (he's obsessed)
X-Men 3 (well, I had to find out what happened to Jean Grey)
My bloody virus protection scan screen (for hours - it won't stop and it won't go away)

Listening to
Bushfire protection lectures from the local CFA
Possibly also the odd spin of Justin Timberlake

Eating
An awful lot of Christmas lunches at work
Lettuce, rocket and peas from my garden - tomatoes by next week

And also
The first reviews of Billabong Bill arrived (they're posted over here)

Atonement

I recently read a review of the new film which described Atonement as based on “Ian McEwan’s romantic epic”.
I can’t think of anything less like a romantic epic.
Well, actually I can (Chesil Beach, for one), but that’s beside the point.
That’s not even a PR person resorting to that cliché: it was a film critic. Shoddy.
Makes me wonder about interesting ways to apply some of those other standard film/book cover blurbs…
Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s story of forbidden love
Possum Magic, a sweeping family saga
Silence of the Lambs is a sensitive and insightful portrait
War and Peace, a fearless expose of one man’s driving ambition
Then of course there’s that hard-hitting documentary, laugh out loud, unputdownable, wickedly funny, classic, five-tissue, pageturner – Hansard.

Changes

We have a new government. I use the term "new" advisedly. I hope it will be filled with zeal and ready to kick the place back into shape.
I should be relieved but I am strangely furious.
John Howard was shown the door by the electorate in no uncertain fashion, and I spent some hours on election night hanging out waiting to see him concede defeat on the TV.
But I'm not entirely sure that he did.
He agreed that the election had been won by the Opposition, but he didn't concede anything much.
And I woke up the next morning in a fury, because one of his major claims in the concession speech was that his legacy was an Australia that is "prouder".
I have rarely been ashamed of my country until the last few years, and I know many others who feel the same. I've been living overseas and been called to account many times for "my" country's attitude to refugees, its own indigenous peoples, Kyoto, and the war in Iraq. (And the rugby scores, but that's another matter.)
I know exactly what Howard means because his version of national pride is completely transparent and God knows we've been beaten around the collective head with it often enough. Howard's pride has to do with installing flagpoles in every school and keeping out anyone different and narrowing the study of history so that it only tells the "good bits".
But pride is not about flagpoles or packaging history.
Nor is history about pride - it's much more interesting than that, and much more important. History has light and shade, shame, regret, humour, anger and innovation.
Only a simplistic nationalist pride is less complicated than history - and that, as we know, can have disastrous consequences.
Howard makes much of Anzac Day and the Gallipoli spirit - that's a central motif in his version of pride.
Well, I've stood on the beach at Gallipoli, and pride had nothing to do with it. What I felt was horror, humility, sorrow, awe and anger. I felt loss. I felt the savage edge of hypocrisy and stupidity, and I felt that nationalism had an awful lot to answer for.
Australia after eleven years of Howard's "history" is not prouder: it's going to take an awful lot to overcome the shame, and the scorn of much of the rest of the world, and to return to the country a decent ethical framework, a deep sense of justice and, above all, vision.
I hope the new government is up to it.
Good luck.

Tom Kitten

We have a new member of the household.
He's not very big.

Touche

I fenced when I was young. A great deal. Every day at school, and training in the evenings and competitions on weekends.
I ended up with an enduring obsession with swords, a few medals, and quadriceps the size of Uluru. I even have a sword tattoo.
So it’s not surprising that my first books were about pirates, and I’m working on another now about a duelist – a real-life female D’Artagnan. I sit on the train, researching for the new novel, re-reading some of my histories of sword-life, and imagining the moves and plays in each duel as I read.
The other day I noticed my sword hand subtly moving into quarte – a parry – and get ready to riposte, as I read.

So that’s it.
I have to start fencing again.
My quadriceps are aching just at the thought of it.

Scribbles

I don't get to sit at this desk much lately.
In fact, since I moved into this house - the dream house - and started working full-time again, I haven't sat still anywhere at all, except for an awful lot of collapsing exhausted in an armchair in the evenings, something that has resulted in strange new behaviours such as a fixation with So You Think You Can Dance and anything else that might flutter past my eyes.
There's just so much to do. And no clear headspace.
This morning I woke up at five, lay still and good and quiet for an hour, crept out for a cup of tea at six and by seven, when I was impatient to start planting and banging around, it started pouring rain.
So here I am. At the desk.
From here I can see frothy white sea of ti-tree flowers, and misty rain across the river, and the stick that was a rose bush last week until it became collateral damage in the ongoing rabbit insurgency.
I don't think I've actually sat here to write anything creative at all. Ever.
I have, however, started madly scribbling on the train in the mornings, the long-awaited (by me, anyway) novel about La Maupin: an 18th century swordswoman, opera singer and outrageous flirt. A story so ridiculous that it couldn't possibly be true - and yet it is. I started researching her about four years ago, but didn't have her voice in my head to start writing until a couple of weeks ago. Now I can't stop; or, at least, when I allow the time, I can't stop. I sit on the train every morning, with Pergolesi's Stabat Mater in my MP3 (for some reason, if I listen to anything else I stop writing) and scribble.
It's something. It's fun. It might even be readable. One day.

Lately I've been...

Reading
A.C. Grayling's philosophical miscellanies
Australian Gardens by Diana Snape
Victoria Glendinning's life of Leonard Woolf
The Monthly
I am, at last, onto Suite Francaise.

Listening to
Missy Higgins' new album
Podcasts of The Book Show

Thinking about
Gardening, mostly, and the huge number of things on my To Do list.
Western philosophy. No, really. But that's another story.

Writing
Not much and not very well. Have to sort that out. Maybe I can put it on the To Do list. Or write a gardening book instead. That might be easier.
Though I have done a final sweep of my never-ending World War One novel and sent it to my agent (again).

Forbidden nonsense

You may recall I love a good scandalous literary hoax, and there are none better than that of Norma Khouri, the Jordanian exile who wrote such a devastating story of her best friend’s death at the hands of her family, in Forbidden Love – and exposed the truth about honour killings to millions of readers around the world.

Or not, as the case may be.

Khouri may well be one of the more spectacular literary con artists of all time: not merely confused, or making a literary point, or psychopathic, or in a bit deep. This is someone who seems to have perpetrated yet another in a series of deceptions – the unkind, such as the FBI and the Chicago police force, may call it fraud – and writing a book about something that never happened is perhaps less of a crime than ripping off old women with dementia who now have no life savings or anywhere to live.

Last week, I saw Anna Broinowski’s documentary, Forbidden Lie$. It is, like its subject, aggravating, flowery, declamatory and many-layered; and that’s not a criticism of the film-maker. Khouri is eel-like in both her slipperiness and opaque expression, though pathetically transparent in certain moments. Lies upon lies upon lies.

Like Helen Demidenko/Darville (who at least never claimed to be writing “faction” in The Hand that Signed the Paper), she not only deceives readers, publishers, media (and in Demidenko’s case, award judges) but also betrays and undermines the efforts of people coming to terms with extremely difficult issues in their own lives and in their communities; be it Holocaust survivors, or women struggling to find identities in the modern Arab world, or those affected by so-called honour killings in any society.

I can’t believe Broinowski refrained from slapping Khouri hard during one of their ridiculous traipses around Amman. The woman sitting behind me in the cinema was so engrossed she heckled, and I can’t say I blame her.

Although the film does go on a bit long, that’s understandable, because it takes the film-maker, and the authorities, and the con artist’s victims, and consequently the audience a while to really get our heads around the depths of deception and layers of lies.

Exhausting, exasperating, and necessary.
You can watch a trailer here.

In the bag

Got my new book in the mail, quite unexpectedly. Didn’t think it’d be back from the printer for weeks.
It’s gorgeous, even if I do say so myself. Though I can say so, because the gorgeousness is nothing to do with me, and all to do with illustration, printing, and Random House’s willingness to invest in a splash of gold tinsel across the front cover.