Monthly Archives: Jan 2011

‘We live together or we die together’

Posted on 10 Jan 2011 | 1 comment

Have a look at this:

Thousands of Muslims honored a promise made by their leaders and showed up at Christmas Mass or at candlelight vigils outside Egyptian churches on Friday, offering their bodies as human shields against any acts of terrorists. The observances were tense, in view of the New Year’s Day bombing of a cathedral in Alexandria, which killed 21. The Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on January 7. Among those Muslims making this statement was beloved comedian Adil Imam. Since the 1990s Imam has been active in combating radicalism, memorably in his film “Kebab and Terrorism” (Kebab wa Irhab).

Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

1 Comment

Posted in From the web

Tagged

Crispin: The Cross of Lead

Posted on 7 Jan 2011 | 3 comments

Avi, Crispin: the Cross of Lead (Scholastic 2002)

Moving house is supposed to be one of the most stressful things you can do. It certainly claims a lot of attention, and I thought perhaps a mediaeval adventure for young readers would be an appropriately diverting read. Crispin: The Cross of Lead turned out to be just the ticket – it’s straightforward but intelligent, with enough authenticating detail, political savvy and period vocabulary (I’m familiar with terce, sext and none, can guess what a glaive is, and had to look up mazer) to be interesting.

The 13 year old hero – ‘Asta’s son’ – doesn’t even know his own name at the start of the book. He and his mother have been outcasts in their small village, and now that his mother has died he is almost completely alone in the world. Things get rapidly worse. For reasons he doesn’t understand his life is threatened, and he flees the village that is all he has ever known. He is taken under the wing of a traveling juggler who turns out, of course, to be more than he seems, and we get an age-appropriate taste of the kind of 14th century European politics that informed Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. There’s a twist involving the young hero’s identity that you might be able to guess even from that wispy outline, and would be unsurprising to most of the 10 to 12 year old target readership (a phrase that always reminds me of a Tohby Riddle cartoon where a cheerful adult is taking aim at the head of a small child with a book that’s about to become a projectile). The final scenes are awfully implausible, in way that suggests a tight deadline was being met, but that wasn’t enough to take away from my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

If you don’t know Avi’s work (evidently that’s not a pen name, but the name he was given by his sister when he was small it’s the only one he uses now in his early seventies), I’d recommend starting with The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, in which another 13 year old has equally implausible but wonderfully swashbuckling adventures on the high seas in the early 19th century.

3 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , ,

Mark Haddon’s Spot of Bother

Posted on 3 Jan 2011 | 4 comments

Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother (Vintage 2007)

This is a Family-Celebration-Goes-Horribly-Wrong comedy, and since we’ve just had a Wedding in the Family it was a timely read for me. Thankfully none of our disasters got beyond impending status, though the heavens came close to opening, the dog could easily have been kidnapped when he stayed behind in the park to cadge barbecued sausages from perfect strangers, and any number of half acknowledged emotional storms were crackling on the far horizon. In this book, as indeed in this whole genre of comedy, the disasters actually happen – the bride’s brother turns up late covered in mud and subsequently snogs his boyfriend in shocked view of the born-again in-laws, her father gives a bizarre speech and then headbutts one of the guests – but everything turns out all right in the end.

What makes the book interesting – compared, say, to Frank Oz’s dire box office success Death at a Funeral (so great a success that there was a remake within five years) – is the way it takes us inside the mind of a man who becomes increasingly irrational as the book progresses. George, father of the bride and disrupter of the wedding reception, is a fairly dull man, recently retired and building a studio so he can pursue his long neglected art hobby. On the first page of the book, he sees a suspicious lesion on his hip and panics. From there on, he progressively loses his grip on reality, helped by a number of the key certainties of life crumbling before his eyes. But this isn’t the The Yellow Wallpaper: eve n when George is suffering the worst, it stays funny. The prose is straightforward and engaging, as you’d expect from an accomplished writer for children, though the sex scenes make it unlikely that this will cross over from adult to child readers as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time did.

I found it refreshing to be taken on a journey into (and possibly out of) irrationality that isn’t Gothic, or medicalised, or political, or in other ways portentous. I’m uneasy that the comic treatment may involve the domestication of awful suffering, but it’s never callous. That is to say, this is an enjoyable, light read with some substantial barbs in it.

4 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged

Dogs on ice

Posted on 2 Jan 2011 | 7 comments

Here’s a dog treat idea that deserves wide currency.

You do need a little equipment: a balloon (one balloon for each dog); some scraps of meat or peanut butter or other substance attractive to dog(s); water.

Chop the meat up fine and force it into the balloon. I used a kitchen funnel. I pushed the meat into the narrow part of the funnel using the handle of a bowl scraper, then kneaded it down the neck of the balloon. It wasn’t too hard.

Fill the balloon with water. It doesn’t need to be very full – I was happy with a diameter of about seven centimetres.

Tie the balloon off, and put it into the freezer for 24 hours or more.

Give to dog(s) when they are in need of entertainment, or just when the weather is unpleasantly hot.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

7 Comments

Posted in Diary

Tagged

The year in review (lazily)

Posted on 1 Jan 2011 | 5 comments

A handy blogging tradition which I got from Pete is to cut and paste the first line of the first post of each month of the year as a way to reflect briefly on 2010 without necessarily engaging the mind. So here goes:

January: I came out of  Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox wondering if I oughtn’t reconsider my devotion to the cinema.

February: Thanks to Antony Loewenstein for this, from Winter Soldier testimony in 2008.

March: It can’t be! Two full weeks since I blogged! I must have been busy.

April: We went this morning to what we’re told these days is even more popular with Australians than the beach or the footie – the art gallery.

May: One of my highlights of last year’s Sydney Writers Festival was Alleyway Honour in the Bankstown Town Hall.

June: Dennis Hopper does Rudyard Kipling … on the Johnny Cash show. (via Harriet the Blog)

July: Reading a book while walking is different from walking while wearing earphones.

August: This morning people in my house said to each other, ‘How about that wind?’

September: There are wordy conflagrations in Melbourne around about now that are sending occasional sparks up Sydney way.

October: Today is Arthur Boothroyd’s hundredth birthday.

November: Those who know about such things say the best introduction to Philip K Dick’s fiction is his short stories, especially ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’.

December: This book inspired two of my November blog sonnets, but that’s no reason not to give it a separate entry.

No mention of weddings, buying and selling houses, girlfriend transforming from harried consultant to blithe Art Student, etc etc etc. But there you have it. Happy New Year, all!

5 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized