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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WP Bookblog Listing
Reading & watching- The Weekend (Bernhard Schlink 2008, Translated Shaun Whiteside) 21 January 2020Just to make it a hat trick of weekends.
- Sex Education Series 2 (Laurie Nunn 2020) 19 January 2020I imagine someone coming to this wirhout having seen series one might be pout off by the opening sequence of a 15 year old biy's compulsive masturbation. To them I would say: Switch it off now and go back to the beginning – there's something glorious and funny and deeply sane in the explicit content of this series.
- Dark Emu (Bruce Pascoe 20) 16 January 2020Now that Brice Pascoe is under attack from someone who thought it was better to go to Peter Dutton than to have it out at the local level, this book has leapt from my To Be Read shelf.
- My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies (Dave Brubaker & Sean Phillips 2018) 16 January 2020Another Christmas present, a companion piece in crime.
- Modern Love, Series 1 (Jpohn Carney 2019) 16 January 2020A surprisingly benign collection of love stories based on a New York Times column.
- The Weekend (Bernhard Schlink 2008, Translated Shaun Whiteside) 21 January 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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