November verse 10: Wiggle and Jiggle at the Library
For Scott Morrison
We're here to sing and dance and jiggle,
mums, a dad and sundry grands,
toddlers primed with twinkle-twinkle,
row-row, incy-wincy hands.
'Welcome all, here's bells and shakers.
Let's go where the songs will take us.
We'll have great fun this afternoon
though sadly I can't hold a tune.'
That was no lie. She sang with gusto,
high and low but always wrong,
We tried and failed to sing along
fell silent on that all-day bus. To
sing together lifts the heart
but badly led, song falls apart.
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Reading & watching- Binge: Rebecka Martinsson: Arctic Murders Season 2 (from books by Åsa Larsson 2020) 1 August 2020Three years after the end of the first season, and Rebecka is played by a different actor, though most of the other characters stil look the same. Will she and Krister get together? Will the regular murders be solved. The respective answers are 'Intermittently' and 'Yes'.
- The Colony (Grace Karskens 2009) 31 July 2020This has been on my to-be-read shelf since I read Tom Griffiths' The Art of Time Travel.
- Rebecka Martinsson: Arctic Murders (from Åsa Larsson novels 2017) 28 July 2020A Swedish version of Midsomer Murders: not a lot of comedy and a lot of snow, and plenty of murder.
- Agency (William Gibson 2020) 25 July 2020This was a birthday gift months ago. William Gibson of 2020 is not the William Gibson of Neuromancer, but he can still grab you from the first page.
- Towards the End (Ali Alizadeh 2020) 23 July 2020Poetry hot off the press by the author of The last days of Jeanne d'Arc.
- Binge: Rebecka Martinsson: Arctic Murders Season 2 (from books by Åsa Larsson 2020) 1 August 2020
Aah! That thing about singing and not being truly able – rings bells for me. I remember this very season almost upon us back in my Japan teaching days – with middle schoolers and seniors and university students – singing (maybe holding the tune if not tunefully so – Xmas songs and Christmas carols (all let loose in shopping centres across Japan in any event) after explaining their general intent – snowy season: Frosty The Snowman, Rudolf, I’m dreaming… – and the decidedly unbiblical Santa story (but not in Australia – for which we’d sing the Aussie Christmas Carol “The north wind is tossing the leaves….the red dust is over the town…etc.) – or the Jesus nativity tales! (Adeste fidelis… We Three Kings, Away in a manger… and And even within that reference of mine – the red dust bit – acknowledged;edgement that for umpteen decades the invader kinds of land-use has been the antithesis to the careful millennia-long land management practices of the First Nations peoples! And just before departing Tbilisi in Georgia on Monday last – our Georgian guide telling us of forest wild-fires in the country’s mountainous north-west – country mostly above 2000 metres above sea level – peaks over 5,000 metres – and despite recent falls of snow among which we had tramped and slid and fallen – no bones broken thank goodness – and where such fires had never before occurred – amid retreating glaciers – climate change had well-and-truly arrived!
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Thank for that truly Proustian comment, Jim – from a children’s event in suburban Sydney to the mountains of Georgia by way of Latin sacred song, Japanese supermarkets and the havoc wrought by colonialism in Australia, all miraculously cohering in virtually a single sentence.
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You’ve enumerated perfectly all my faults of passion and connection and long-windedness! Merci beaucoup, mon ami!
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But being Proustian is not a fault. Quite the opposite
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