Monthly Archives: Jul 2023

Winter reads 3: Tony Birch’s The White Girl

Posted on 31 Jul 2023 | 6 comments

This is my third post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

Tony Birch, The White Girl (UQP 2020)

Tony Birch has turned up in my blog fairly frequently as a contributor to Overland, winner of awards and speaker at writers’ festivals (link here). The White Girl the first novel of his that I’ve read, and it has been burning a hole on my bookshelf for years.

A friend told me she gave up on it after about 20 pages because it was full of stereotypes and it signalled crudely what was going to happen – she’d rather read non-fictional accounts of the terrible things done to First Nations families by white justice and so-called welfare, rather than something filtered through a more or less didactic imagination.

She was wrong. Many expectations are set up in the first part of the book, many disasters foreshadowed. But the expectations are more often than not overturned.

It’s the early 1950s. Odette Brown lives in the now near-deserted part of an Australian country town that once was home to a sizeable Aboriginal community. Now there’s just her, her fair-skinned, blonde-haired, twelve-year-old granddaughter Sissy, and at some distance her oldest friend Millie. Both Odette and Sissy have run-ins with a loutish young man who carries a gun and drives a dangerous truck. The local police offer no protection, and – worse – there’s a new officer in charge who takes his role as ‘Guardian’ of all Aboriginal children seriously. He is biding his time to take Sissy into ‘care’. Add to that, Odette has increasingly frequent spasms of pain in her side and a doctor has told her she absolutely must have surgery – surgery which she can’t afford, even if she was willing to leave Sissy unprotected while she was in hospital.

So the set-up ticks a lot of boxes: apart from the above, there’s a retired Afghan cameleer, a Polish teenager on the run from immigration officials, a Holocaust survivor with a tattooed number on his arm, a brain-damaged white man who runs a junkyard, a posh white woman who buys art from Odette and sells it with a bogus tribal attribution.

But, probably at about the place where my friend gave up, the story takes off. The focus is on Odette’s courage and ingenuity. Allies turn up in unexpected places. Sissy’s white appearance becomes an asset as well as a vulnerability. Other Aboriginal people tell their stories to Odette. Partly one feels that these stories serve a didactic purpose, making sure we know that terrible things were happening to First Nations people in the real world. But they also remind us how high the stakes are, right up to a climactic scene where the evil policeman (yes, he is pretty two-dimensional) makes his final play.

Page 76 is one of two moments when a First Nations character enters a rundown settler dwelling. In the other moment, Odette finds the decrepit old man, father of the young man with the gun and the truck. In this one, Sissy is testing the limits of her freedom on a day when Odette won’t be home until late. She wanders into an abandoned white farmhouse, knowing she could be in trouble, and the scene takes on an Mrs-Haversham eeriness:

Sissy opened the door of an ornately carved wardrobe. It was full of women’s dresses, scarves and coats. She reached out and touched the sleeve of a red velvet dress pitted with moth holes. The material fell apart in her hands. In the mirror in the centre of the wardrobe, Sissy could see the fireplace and mantle behind her. A large gilded portrait sat above the mantle. She walked across the room and stood in front of the frame. It was a photograph of a white family, standing in front of the house. The men in the photograph wore suits, the women dresses and straw hats. Children sat in front of the adults. The girls had beautiful long hair and wore white dresses. Sissy put a finger to the glass and imagined herself wearing such a fine dress. On the edge of the group, at a slight distance from the family, stood two Aboriginal women. The older woman had her arms crossed over her breasts and looked sternly into the camera. The younger woman refused the lens completely, looking off to one side.

What can I say? My friend gave up too soon.

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Winter reads 2: D G Lloyd’s alive in Dubbo

Posted on 30 Jul 2023 | 5 comments

This is my second post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

D G Lloyd was born in Dubbo in the late 70s. After spending some time in coastal cities as a young adult, he lives in Dubbo once again. This book is a celebration, of sorts, of his hometown.

It opens with an epigraph from one of Dubbo’s most notorious daughters, Kate Leigh, who is described politely by the Australian Dictionary of Biography as ‘a crime entrepreneur’. The epigraph reads, ominously, ‘Better dead than alive in Dubbo.’

Roughly speaking there are three kinds of poems in the book: incidents from childhood or more recent times, impressionistic images of places, and character sketches. There’s poverty and various kinds of desperation, churches and a brothel, heroin and alcohol, First Nations and settlers (I read D G Lloyd as non-Indigenous), locusts and PTSD. A portrait of the town emerges that’s unlikely to attract tourists, but it rings true – as if the poet has set out regularly with a verbal equivalent of a sketch book and come back with its pages full.

Page 76 chimes beautifully with the epigraph, being the book’s only poem dedicated to the dead: 

Old Dubbo Cemetery
Uncared for, a grassy verge and 
artificial roses decorating headstones 
fallen in;
corroded shards and etchings, tilted obelisks,
a cobweb and an orb-weaver in between

the dirt and the gravel, 
oleanders,
a baby's grave marked by a small iron cross; 
the stone angel. Eyeless.
Sullen lips speckled with mould, petals 
drifting from outstretched fingers onto brown earth.

A council worker stands behind hakea wattle 
scraping his boot against the water meter. Cicadas 
chant (endless);
one of the monuments is missing an arm.
A blue-tongued lizard lies motionless beneath, 
bathing in sunlight
against a tawny, heart-shaped tombstone.

The conjures up an image of the cemetery, without editorialising or sentiment. Like most of the book, it feels artless: no rhyme to speak of, no metrical effects, no striking metaphors. Yet it holds the attention – I’ve now read it a dozen times and I’m not tired of it.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. There’s no full verb in the first two stanzas, but a past participle on almost every line: Uncared for, fallen in, corroded, tilted, marked, speckled, outstretched. All movement is in the past. What life there is, in grass, orb-weaver, oleanders and mould, doesn’t disrupt the lifelessness. The first of the two present participles in these stanzas – decorating – is as static as the headstones it refers to. At last in the eleventh line, there’s some movement with a second present participle – drifting.

As if the spell has been broken, the third stanza is full of life and action: a council worker scrapes his boots, a wattle grows, cicadas chant, a blue-tongued lizard sunbathes. The water meter, by implication, ticks. That the cicadas’ chant is endless suggests that in some way life goes on and will keep going on. One of the statues now has a full verb – ‘is missing’ – so even there there’s a hint of agency.

The final image of the lizard, the sunlight and the tombstone is already full of life, when the description of the tombstone as tawny, heart-shaped takes it to another level. The unexpected ‘tawny’ describes the the tombstone as a rich brown, weathered colour rather than the dull grey that dominates most cemeteries, but the vital associations from its usual use – of wild animals and birds, or port wine – hover around it.

Finally, the stone is heart-shaped. It would be pushing it to see a reference to the famous last line of Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb‘, ‘What will survive of us is love,’ but that is presumably the hope that led to the tombstone being shaped that way. Here the love has not survived, but its emblem, the’ tawny heart-shaped tombstone’, is part of the life that continues.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Alive in Dubbo.

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Winter reads 1: Angie Contini’s fierCe

Posted on 29 Jul 2023 | Leave a comment

I’m away from home for two weeks to escape the worst of Sydney’s winter, and have brought a number of physically small books with me. I’ll blog briefly about each of them, focusing as usual on page 76. Here’s the first.

Angie Contini, fierCe (Flying Island Books, Pocket Poets Series 20023)

fierCe is part of Flying Islands’ series of more than 90 hand-sized books of poetry. It’s a striking little book – its poems are accompanied on almost every page by exuberant collages.

The collaged images come mostly from the vegetable kingdom and from classic and Renaissance art. I recognise, for example, the ancient Greek statue of Laocoön wrestling the snake, some Hieronymus Bosch, some Botticelli. The overall effect is of decorative tumult, with plenty of naked bodies and flourishing mushrooms, as in the cover (to the left), which sadly is the only one in colour.

The poems are also tumultuous, but here the nakedness is emotional, evoking what a note on the inside front cover calls eco-despair, plunging into dark places and, in the final sections, emerging from them. The four sections are: ‘eCo-propheCieS’, ‘dISencHantMEnt’, ‘rEsiliEnce’, ‘timE’, ‘Re-enChantmeNt’ and ‘tranSformations’. (The unorthodox use of capitals is restricted to these headings and the book’s title. As far as I can tell, it’s arbitrary, a generally unsettling device, perhaps echoing the tumult of the collages.)

There are many wonderful things in the book, especially the poem ’body’ in the final section, which looks back at the ‘rabid waltz’ of an eating disorder.

My plan to focus on page 76 hit an obstacle: the page is blank. Page 77 is also blank, except for the word ‘Re-enChantmeNt’, the title of the fifth, second-last section. So, on to page 78.

Beneath a row of what I take to be dancers on an ancient Greek frieze, there’s this small poem:

old soul
come with your wind 
into this wake
wearing thistles and gauze 
make me a feeler again

The poem is a turning point in the book. Having emerged from ‘the bleakness of ‘timE’, we pivot towards ‘Re-enChantmeNt’, that is, a recovery of magic and meaning. This poem is an invocation opening the section. It could almost be a response to the old Anglican hymn:

Breathe on me, breath of God,
fill me with life anew.

Both hymn and poem use the metaphor of wind/breath for inspiration. But where the hymn addresses the Christian God and asks for new life, drawing on the scriptural sense of new life in the spirit, the poem has to define, or at least suggest, the object and purpose of its invocation.

I take the ‘old soul’ to be a kind of Jungian Self, one’s deeply unified humanity, transcending the circumstances and accidents of time and place. It manifests here ‘wearing thistles and gauze’. Once I got past the image of James Thurber’s ‘I come from haunts of coot and hern‘ cartoon thrown up by my recalcitrant mind, I realised that this line brings into focus the relationship between the book’s images and words. ‘Gauze’ signifies the clothes of the classic dancing figures, and ‘thistles’ stand in for the natural world, not always comfortable but sometimes beautiful: so the line, and the images, suggest a reaching for stability in nature and in the long history of art. [Added later: I asked a couple of friends who hadn’t read the book, or this poem, what the phrase ‘thistles and gauze’ suggested to them: thistles, they said, are likely to sting, and gauze can be used as a bandage. Fair enough, I thought, the old soul is aligned with nature that can both hurt and help recover. That works too.]

There are two more words that stand out: wake and feeler.

Without the context of the book as a whole, wake is open to two meanings. It could place the poet in the disturbed aftermath of something, metaphorically the passage of a large vessel. Or the poet could be about to sing at an event held after a death. In context, the latter feels more likely: there have been poems of depression and anxiety, of despair: this word powerfully suggests that those states have led to a kind of death.

Re-enchantment is to be a kind of resurrection: ‘Make me a feeler again.’ I love that line. It reminds me of the wonderful lines from George Herbert’s ‘The Flower‘:

After so many deaths I live and write;
         I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing.

Angie Contini is calling on her old soul to restore her to that condition. The opposite of despair isn’t hope, but feelingness, aliveness. On a day when the premier of New South Wales has announced that measures to reduce this state’s emissions won’t work, when we’re told that the Gulf Stream may be about to fail, and the Antarctic ice has failed to regenerate this winter, the temptation to go numb is strong – this little poem is timely as a reminder of the emotional work that needs to be done.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of fierCe.

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Journal Catch-up 20

Posted on 24 Jul 2023 | 5 comments

My current practice of focusing on page 76 when blogging about books serves me well when the subject is journals. It helps to resist the pull to go on at tedious length about the whole contents.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 8 (Giramondo 2023)

This is a fabulous issue of Heat. A clutch of ‘animal poems’ by Judith Beveridge would have justified the cost of the magazine. ‘Mourning a Breast’ by the late Hong Kong writer Xi Xi, translated by Jennifer Feeley, is an excerpt from a yet-to-be-published novel that includes, among other things, a gruelling account of breast surgery and some fascinating reflections on different Chinese and English translations of Madame Bovary. Send Me a Sign? is a charming essay on Henry Handel Richardson and spiritualism by Cameron Hurst (this one can be read on the Heat website).

Page 76 occurs in the short story ‘Shopping’ by Katerina Gibson, whose collection, Women I Know, won the Christina Stead prize this year. Like Xi Xi’s narrator, the protagonist of this story is interested in translation. She works at a writers’ centre where she is in love with her boss. The story is like an elegant tapestry of twenty-something lostness and finding a way: her work; her relationships, both those at work and her initially unromantic sex life; her compulsive overspending on clothes and her general angst/anomie. I loved it, especially for a key turning point where she reveals her compulsion to a friend and instead of running a mile he laughs and says, ‘But you don’t seem crazy at all.’ (Sorry for the spoiler!)

This seems an appropriate place to mention Giramondo’s promising new online initiative, Re:Heat. It’s a bi-monthly newsletter in which a current contributor to Heat Series 3 encounters an item from the archives. The first of the newsletters features an article by Josephine Rowe on ‘Alive in Ant and Bee’ by Gillian Mears, which was published in Series 2 Number 13, in 2007. You can read Gillian Mears’ piece here, and Josephine Rowe’s response here.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 250 (Summer 2022)
(Some of the content – less than in the past – is online at the revamped Overland website, and I’ve included links)

Great editors think alike. Overland is also launching a series in which current writers respond to items from the archives, in their case as part of the print journal. Jordana Silverstein kicks it off with a response to a 1988 story by Lily Brett, which is republished in the journal. Neither piece in online yet, but both are interesting.

At the other end of a readability spectrum is the issue’s first article, ‘Structures don’t go out onto the streets? Notes on John Tranter’s radical pastiche‘ by Louis Armand, which must be the ultimate in poetry insider talk, making no concessions to readers who don’t know their Jacques Lacan from their Ern Malley. Definitely for the spectacularly well read.

Other articles are more accessible and, to me at least, infinitely more interesting: Dallas Rogers on early colonial maps as instruments of colonialism, Jeff Sparrow on elite capture of identity politics, Fiannuala Morgan on colonial literature and bushfires are all worth reading. That’s all before we get to the poetry and fiction sections.

The twelve pages of poetry include the runners-up in the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize (the winner was published in the previous issue). Of these, ‘Camperdown grief junk’ by Wiradjuri poet Yeena Kirkbright spoke most to me in its tour of the Camperdown Cemetery, so beloved of poets. Cameron Lowe’s prose poem ‘Ribbons’ ten pages later also spoke to me. Having just gone on about line breaks in a recent post, I found this phrase just a little squirm-making:

in the rear view mirror there were the back slappers, as usual, jerking off over line breaks.

I’ve been told.

There are 23 pages of fiction, ranging from grim to dystopian, all interesting. The story beginning on page 76, ‘Song and dance’ by Sik Chuan Pua is at the grim end of the spectrum, taking us inside the mind of Clara O’Brien, once a celebrated pianist who is now struggling with physical and mental incoherence in an institution of some kind. Right from the start, the story deftly maintains a double perspective: what Clara sees and what the reader understands in play with each other. It’s no spoiler to say that the story builds towards the word ‘Parkinson’s’. That condition, or something close to it, is there in the first non-bold sentence of this:

She was forty-seven when it began
Her head is locked towards the timber casement windows. Beyond the glass, a lake spreads out. A breeze rattles the shutters. It could be morning. Or late afternoon.
Look, a mysterious orange hue appears. What a hoax, for lakes should be blue as ink. Someone has been up to mischief. Someone has dumped such obnoxious colour, contaminating the lake, transforming beauty into farce. Will someone please restore the lake to its natural colour?

This is Overland‘s 250th issue. Long may it thrive.

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Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert: page 76

Posted on 21 Jul 2023 | 3 comments

Anthony Joseph, Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury Poetry 2022)

I bought a copy of Sonnets for Albert after hearing Anthony Joseph’s brilliant chat with Felicity Plunkett at the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this year. The Albert of the title is the poet’s father who was mostly an absence during his childhood in Trinidad, where he was raised by Albert’s mother, who loved both of them. My blog post (here) on the Festival conversation gives some of the detail – and also some of Joseph’s interesting observations about the sonnet form and the relationship of Caribbean writers to the English language.

Almost every poem in the book is a sonnet. They don’t constitute a biography in verse, but skip about chronologically, from a childhood memory, to Albert’s final illness and death, to his period in New York City as a reverend. Some have a rich Caribbean music to them. Others are in effect prose poems, though they preserve the sonnet’s 14 lines with a turn in the middle.

It’s a terrific book. Albert emerges as a fascinating, charming rogue. The poet’s complex feelings for him, including deep affection, and grief at his death, are alive and contagious on the page.

Anthony Joseph lives in the UK, and the book is shot through with the expat’s love of his homeland. When I heard that he was from Trinidad, I mentally adjusted that to the nation’s name, Trinidad and Tobago. But the poems themselves are clear: he comes from Trinidad; Tobago is a different island and to have one’s father live there is to have an absent father.

Page 76 is ‘P.O.S.G.H. I’, the first of two poems whose titles are the initials of the Port of Spain General Hospital (so it’s not just Sydney people who refer to hospitals by their initials – I live in walking distance of R.P.A.H.):

Shakespeare or Petrarch might not have recognised this as a sonnet. There’s no rhyme scheme, no formal metre, not even an obvious division into eight- and six-line sections. But it has its own music, which becomes clear if you read it aloud: in the first couple of lines, for instance, the echoing sounds in ‘hope to hold’ and ‘flirts with the nurses’ demand to be read slowly and liltingly. And the effect of the long lines becomes clearer when you read this poem alongside ‘P. O. S. G. H. II’ on the facing page. I won’t push the publisher’s tolerance by quoting that poem as well, but it deals with a later, more ominous hospital experience with Albert (called ‘the big man’ in both poems) and is made up of short lines, with dialogue, and a suggestion of Creole – ‘He eat up all the joy’.

There’s a leisurely, reflective feel to this poem, and emotive suggestions emanate from its long lines like smoke. A whole web of family relationships is evoked.

It begins with Albert:

Having caught his first heart attack, the big man 
gives me hope to hold, says he feels good enough to leave.
He flirts with the nurses. He is in hospital, on Charlotte Street,

A lot is conveyed and suggested in that first line. That it was his first heart attack means that others were to follow, and though heart attacks aren’t contagious, the word ‘caught’ suggests that this one made ‘the big man’ vulnerable to more. As the sentence continues over the line break, the second line pulls back from these grim implications: there’s hope.

When my own father – a very different man from Albert – was close to death, a nurse came each day to wash him and make him comfortable. He too flirted – he joked about the lengths he’d had to go to to have a beautiful woman scrub his back: it’s a thing between men of a certain age and generation and women who care for them. It may not mean the man has recovered, but it’s a sign that he’s in good spirits. In the context of the rest of the book, we know that for Albert (unlike my father) it’s also a sign that he’s back to his disreputable normal, and there’s a hint that the poet’s relief is mixed with exasperation at the flirtiness. Attention turns away from Albert, to the hospital and the memories it evokes:

the hospital that always smells of burnt milk and disinfectant.
That same hospital of first consciousness, where I visited 
my grandfather after his blackout and sickness - in 1977 - 
after stopping with my grandmother on Gordon Street corner, 
to buy the old bull peanut punch and Mopsy Biscuit.

That ‘always’ tells us a lot. This is a familiar place, as the rest of the poem spells out. ‘First consciousness’ could mean many things – perhaps even birth – but it certainly implies that the hospital has always been part of the poet’s world. In a beautifully compressed way, this line and what follows evoke key points of his family story. ‘My grandfather’ appearing after a line break enacts a kind of swerve away from the present to a moment in the past, to another sick man. It’s implied that his grandfather’s illness had some of the same unstated emotional impact as his father’s current illness, an implication reinforced by the way ‘the old bull’ echoes ‘the big man’.

My web search didn’t tell me anything about Mopsy Biscuit, and peanut punch may be either a popular Guinness-based drink for adults with rumoured aphrodisiac qualities (hmm, ‘the old bull’?), or a children’s drink, depending on where you look. Either way, the memory is essentially benign – the poet was 11 in 1977 and buying treats is what stands out in his memory of that event.

Right on cue at the end of line eight, the sonnet turns. The hospital is not always a place of healing or relatively carefree visits:

The hospital of windows from where I watched blue smoke 
rise from the morgue and turned away from my mother's bed 
to catch my evening flight. Two days later she blinked hard 
into cancerous death.

I try not to use words like enjambment and caesura, but wow, cop the enjambments and caesuras in these lines! That is to say, notice how the sense flows over the line breaks, and breaks sharply in the middle of lines, and how the echoing hard D sounds at the end of the second and third lines intensify those effects.

Another, heavier memory is stirred. The poet is older, visiting from elsewhere (Anthony Joseph moved to the UK in his early 20s). His mother is barely a presence, and when he turns away from her it’s with a bleak premonition of death in the blue smoke. There’s no hope to hold this time, and though both the flight and the death occur midline, they both have a feel of finality.

But the poem continues:

into cancerous death. That same ex-colonial hospital 
by Memorial Park where my father once lifted me onto his shoulders, 
so I could see the carnival pass.

I love the way this poem is so firmly rooted in a place. The word ‘hospital’ rings like a chime – five times in 14 lines. The hospital is precisely situated, on Charlotte Street, opposite the corner of Gordon Street, by Memorial Park, and its architecture and history are evoked in the one word ‘ex-colonial’.

The poem ends with another turn, a kind of equivalent to the couplet that ends a classic sonnet. It’s as if after going on a short tour of the family – grandfather, grandmother, mother – we come back to Albert and can remember him, without the distancing irony of ‘the big man’, as ‘my father’. Loss is prefigured by the first heart attack, but there’s also a loss that happened long ago: the ‘once’ when his father lifted the poet on his shoulders is gone. It’s no coincidence that Memorial Park is mentioned here: this last moment of the poem has an elegiac feel to it. He was alive. He was my father. He lifted me on his shoulders. The carnival is over.

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The Confessions of Saint Augustine, first report

Posted on 20 Jul 2023 | 5 comments

Saint Augustine, Confessions (approx 400 CE, translated by R S Pine-Coffin 1961, Penguin Classics edition): pages 1–110, from beginning to end of Book V

If St Augustine invented the literary form of autobiography, he did it by accident. The impression I have so far is that in Confessions he is telling the story of his life as a teaching device. The message seems to be that humans depend on the mercy of God for everything, from mother’s milk to the ability to read. Secondary to that, humans are born sinful. So far at least, quite a lot of his ink is spilled in arguing with the Manichees, and a lot of that argument is pretty opaque to the casual reader, by which I mean me.

Still, it’s quite a thing to spend 10 minutes or so each morning in contact with a mind that was alive nearly two millennia ago. Two moments grabbed me in the very early chapters.

In writing about his early schooling, even while saying he was a wicked child (for wanting to play rather than study!), he argues against against harsh physical punishment as a teaching tool. After saying he hates Greek but likes Latin, he explains that he learned Latin from his mother and nurses, and Greek from his stern school teachers. He generalises:

This clearly shows that we learn better in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and compulsion.
hinc satis elucet maiorem habere vim ad discenda ista liberam curiositatem quam meticulosam necessitatem.

(1:14)

A little further on, after arguing that the innocence of childhood is a myth, he comes face to face with Jesus’ apparently contradictory view in Matthew’s Gospel, and offers this bit of ingenious argumentation:

It was, then, simply because they are small that you used children to symbolise humility when, as our King, you commended it by saying that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.
humilitatis ergo signum in statura pueritiae, rex noster, probasti, cum aisti: talium est regnum caelorum

(1:19)

If I’m just going to quote the bits that stood out for me from amid the theologising, I can’t go past this wonderful paragraph about friendship:

We could talk and laugh together and exchange small acts of kindness. We could join in the pleasure that books can give. We could be grave or gay together. If we sometimes disagreed, it was without spite, as a man night differ with himself, and the rare occasions of dispute were the very spice to season our usual accord. Each of us had something to learn from the others and something to teach in return. If any were away, we missed them with regret and gladly welcomed them when they came home. Such things as these are heartfelt tokens of affection between friends. They are signs to be read on the face and in the eyes, spoken by the tongue and displayed in countless acts of kindness. They can kindle a blaze to melt our hearts and weld them into one.

(3:2)

I had expected confessions to loose living. So far, the main wickedness he confesses to is his adherence to the Manichean heresy. He does mentions a de facto wife, but when he goes from Carthage to Rome, he doesn’t tell us if she comes with him.

This morning, his career as a teacher of literature has led him to Milan, where he is deeply impressed by the lectures of (Saint) Ambrose. He finally makes a break from the Manichees. He’s impressed by ‘the academics’, but doesn’t throw in his lot with them. Nor does he embrace the Catholic Church (which is R S Pine-Coffin’s translation of catholica ecclesia, and fair enough, though the capital letters may be a bit misleading), but he becomes a catechumen, which I understand to mean he sees himself as under instruction.

To be continued.

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Larry Niven’s World out of Time: page 76

Posted on 13 Jul 2023 | Leave a comment

Larry Niven, A World out of Time (©1976, Orbit 1977)

It had been a while since I read something that was just good fun, and I turned to my Spec Fic TBR shelf to fill the lack. This yellowing Bookmooched copy of A World out of Time reminded me of the pleasure of Larry Niven’s Ringworld books, of which pretty much the only thing I remember is that I enjoyed them. It practically leapt into my hands.

And now that I’ve read it I don’t have much to say beyond that it is indeed fun. There are whizz-bang planet-shifting fusion engines; there are sex scenes that would barely raise a vicar’s blush these days but were probably titillating for 14-year-old boy readers in 1977; there are chase scenes, theory about the nature of empires, cool improvised weapons, cute mutated animals, scary mind manipulation, and a plot that’s full of unexpected twists. It’s not ‘hard’ science fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson, or weird like China Miéville, or space opera like Star Wars, but it’s got elements of all of them, and it zips along.

It begins, ‘Once there was a dead man.’ People who opted for cryogenics in the 1970s (‘corpsicles’) are revived as slave labour a couple of centuries later; that is, their personalities are harvested and implanted in the bodies of condemned criminals whose brains have been wiped. Our hero, Corbell, is one of the revived corpsicles. The totalitarian government of the future (‘the State’) assigns him the task of piloting a spacecraft on a round mission that is planned to take hundreds, even thousands of years.

The RNA conditioning that enables him to learn his interstellar pilot craft in a matter of days also modifies his brain so he identifies as a servant of the State. But he manages to rebel and takes off instead to visit the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, where he will almost certainly die, again.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to tell you that, with the reluctant help of his State-loyalist computer Peerssa and the wonders of speed-of-light travel, Corbell survives. My arbitrary policy of focusing on page 76 once again bears fruit, as on that page he has just arrived back on a much-changed Earth not thousands of years but roughly three million years into the future. (Maybe one reason I found the book so refreshing is that though the Earth’s temperature is mostly unbearably hot in that distant future, the global heating didn’t happen in the 21st or even the 24th century and wasn’t brought about by anything as mundane as carbon emissions. Ah, the innocence of 1976 future-imaginings!)

On page 76, while Peerssa is orbiting the Earth in their interstellar spacecraft, Corbell has found what looks like a dwelling in a devastated landscape. It made me think of the house at the end of Antonioni’s 1970 movie Zabriskie Point, except this appears to be a single bedroom looking out over the desert. Corbell tells Peerssa that he can’t find a door, and after they decide that it’s unlikely that the roof is meant to lift off or that the entrance is underground:

‘I’ll have to break in,’ he said.
‘Wait. Might the house be equipped with a burglar alarm? I’m not familiar with the design concepts that govern private dwellings. The State built arcologies.’

I had to look up ‘arcology’. It’s a portmanteau word combining ‘architecture’ and ‘ecology’, meaning, according to my phone dictionary, a city built according to a system of architecture that integrates buildings with the natural environment. Peerssa means something slightly different: the State’s arcologies were integrated ecologies of their own, with little attention to the natural environment. I love a book that makes me learn about such concepts.

‘What if it does have a burglar alarm? I’m wearing a helmet. It’ll block most of the sound.’
‘There might be more than bells. Let me attack the house with my message laser.’
‘Will it–?’ Will it reach? Stupid, it was was designed to reach across tens of light-years. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I have the house in view. Firing.’
Looking down on the triangular roof from his post on the roadway, Corbell saw no beam from the sky; but he saw a spot the size of a manhole cover turn red-hot. A patch of earth below the house stirred uneasily; rested; stirred again. Then a ton or so of hillside rose up and spilled away, and a rusted metal object floated out on a whispering air cushion. It was the size of a dishwasher, with a head: a basketball with an eye in it. The head rolled, and a scarlet beam the thickness of Corbell’s arm pierced the clouds.
‘Peerssa, you’re being attacked.’

Peerssa doesn’t have much trouble repelling the attack, and Corbell gets into the house. Though the washing machine plays no further role, both it and the room’s doorlessness foreshadow the kind of challenges Corbell is to face.

This is now the world out of time of the title: apparently deserted, with faint signs of active energy that are almost certainly just machines that have somehow continued to be active long after their human creators and users have died out. The question I had at this point was: ‘If there are no humans left, and the remaining three quarters of the book is to be a Robinson-Crusoe story, how can it stay interesting; and if there are humans, how can they with any degree of plausibility have survived in the devastation that Earth has become?’ At page 76, the real subject of the book is about to become a little more visible: it takes its time showing itself, and when it does, well, it’s fun.

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Saul Griffith’s Wires that Bind

Posted on 7 Jul 2023 | Leave a comment

tl;dr: This is a review of a book that argues that a future that isn’t devastated by climate change is possible. If you can’t bear to read one more thing about global heating, you might like to listen to Saul Griffith talk to ABC’s Richard Fidler at this link.

Saul Griffith, The Wires that Bind: Electrification and Community Renewal (Quarterly Essay 89, 2023)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 90

In the late 1960s at Sydney University, when someone from Engineering took the microphone at an anti-war rally, you could be sure he (they were always men) would speak for the forces of reaction. So there’s a frisson of pleasure for me in reading Saul Griffith’s visionary account of an electrified Australia where fossil fuels are kept in the ground, communities thrive, a new kind of politics has replaced the current toxicity, women’s leadership is acknowledged, and global warming is slowing dramatically. It’s visionary, but suffused with an engineer’s practicality, not to mention a baker’s dozen of complex charts.

If you’re tempted to despair about global heating – and who isn’t? – you’d do well to read this Quarterly Essay. It doesn’t offer blind optimism or hope based only in philosophy, but charts a feasible path to a desired outcome. It covers much of the same ground as the 2021 Quarterly Essay on the same subject, Getting to Zero by Alan Finkel, also an engineer. But where Alan Finkel had been scientific adviser to the Morrison government and seemed, to me at least, to be concerned not to antagonise that do-nothing bunch of deniers, delayers and obfuscators, Saul Griffith comes from playing a role in creating Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and is co-founder of community organisations Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia.

In my blog post on Finkel’s essay, I said:

I was heartened to read Finkel’s lucid, careful, methodical argument that the challenge of the climate emergency can be met – with difficulty, but successfully, and without significant sacrifice (‘No trade off, no dichotomy. Prosperity and low emissions.’). I was also uneasy. Surely something has to change as well as our technology. There was a herd of elephants in the room.

Saul Griffith also seems to offer a way forward that doesn’t involve significant sacrifice, but he does address other elephants. Ordinary householders are at the centre of his argument. We don’t have to see ourselves simply as consumers of whatever is on offer from government and profit-driven businesses; if we act together we can become hugely effective agents for change. One simple thing we can do is to decide that, whenever a household item that depends on fossil fuel needs replacing, we opt for something electrical – an induction stovetop, an electric vehicle, heat pump, and so on. And we can see that our electricity comes from renewable sources. His local postcode, 2515, is making great strides as a community to becoming electrified in this way. If we all did this, without significantly pushing the speed of replacement of devices, we would all be electrified by 2040.

He argues that this electrification would result in cheaper energy and cheaper travel – the expense is all in the initial purchase. Government intervention will be needed to make it possible for less wealthy households to make the shift.

There’s a lot more to his argument. I can’t say I followed it all; some of the more technical bits mystified me; and the economic arguments are out of my league. But having had as an article of faith that technical solutions to global heating exist and all that’s needed is the political will, I’m heartened to read solid argument to back up my sometimes tenuous faith.

My current practice of looking at page 76 can give you a glimpse of how the essay works at a granular level.

The page is in the section ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’, which deals with transport (or transportation as he says, reminding us of his years in the USA). The section includes some envelope pushing – every parking space to have a solar roof, small electric aeroplanes with a 500-km range using today’s battery technology, etc. It also lays out some basic facts. The use of cars and trucks ‘for moving us and ourselves around’ is currently the second largest source of CO2 emissions. The switch to electric vehicles (EVs) is under way, but it’s not a panacea. Cars need not only to go electric (and run on renewably sourced electricity); they also need to be smaller, lighter and slower in order to reduce the environmental damage they cause, including the damage to roads. Griffin produces some interesting figures comparing the emissions per passenger of our most efficient public transport system – Melbourne trams – and a light EV with two passengers: the EV comes out ahead. But that’s not so with heavy vehicles.

Page 76 is mostly the subsection with the title ‘Tax the tyres’. It begins with hard facts:

Australians use about 50 million litres of petroleum products per day, We spend $35–50 billon per year importing foreign oil. The government collects 49 cents per lire, after the various exemptions that are granted (thereby subsiding fossil fuels and emissions), which amounts to around $14 bilion per year. About half of that goes to road building and transportation projects. Even so, it is not enough to pay for all our roads, and councils have to pay for much of this from their rate base.
Reforming how we pay for roads is a gnarly political problem that I think we must have some honesty about. Low-income people commute further, often in less efficient cars, and often for work. The crux of the political problem is that those who can least afford to pay for transport pay the most, and fuel excise exacerbates that problem.

Then he takes us on a brief excursion into utopian imaginings:

I would like more kids to walk to school on dirt paths through forests breathing clean air and learning about ecosystems as they do so. I’d like to fly electric aircraft more and have fewer ecosystem-damaging roads.

He may have utopian leanings, and it sometimes feels as if Damon Gameau’s delightfully optimistic movie 2040 is playing in the background (he does mention it once), but he comes beck to the practical problem:

But with all that, I am not going to deny that roads are useful and we need good road infrastructure. …
If you study road wear, it turns out that the damage to a road is proportional to the square of the weight of a vehicle. A ute will do about seven times as much damage as a passenger car, mostly because of the extra weight. If you were designing systems to pay for our road infrastructure, it would be most scientifically done by charging by the weight of the vehicle and the number of kilometres it travels.

Which calls attention to what may not be an elephant in the room, but is maybe a thorny devil. How do these necessary changes get paid for? ‘If you were designing … it would be most scientifically done by’ indeed. The next paragraph is in some ways characteristic of the essay as a whole. In his acknowledgements, Griffith says it ‘would not have been written without community’ and lists a number of people on whom he relied ‘to contribute long passages’. In this passage, he present an idea that came from the audience on his book tour:

An audience member came up after a talk and suggested what we should do is tax the tyres, which would have the same effect. Heavier cars doing more kilometres go through more tyres faster. It would be a way of taxing the system that pays for roads, which would push the system to evolve to smaller, lighter vehicles. That would be a good thing.

I hope it’s evident from that little bit that the essay is multifaceted, trying ideas on like an essay in the classical sense of the term, having a bit of fun, and offering insights and proposals that could have a profound impact.

As usual with the Quarterly Essay series, the correspondence in Nº 90 fleshes out the subject beautifully. It was excellent to note the absence of people wanting to deny the science, or others pushing for nuclear power as Peter Dutton is doing in the headlines as I write this.

For just one example, Christine Milne posed a question that had been niggling me:

Can the Earth afford the transition to renewables if it is embedded in the linear business-as-usual, take-make-dispose model of unlimited consumerism and economic growth? There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet.

Griffith’s response is worth reading. To paraphrase and crudify his argument: to transform the economic system would take too long – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and this omelette is too urgently needed to worry too much about eggshells.

The passage that stands out for me in Griffith’s response to correspondents is this exemplary piece of self-criticism:

Guilty of boostering, addicted to carrots, I have avoided the hard discussion of regulations with teeth. Perhaps my time in the Land of the Free softened me or made me frightened of things that might be conceived as infringing on personal liberty. … To be very clear, it is in the interest of the energy transition to have a phase-out date for all fossil-fuelled machines, and the sooner the better. Governments are scared of the headlines around mandates and bans, but that is what is actually needed, not eventually, but soon.

At the Sydney Writers’ Festival recently, Saul Griffith said that someone described his earlier book Electrify as a brilliant piece of guerrilla policy-writing. The book went on to play a role in developing major climate-change legislation in the USA. I don’t know if it’s all completely practical or if it addresses the social issues adequately or accurately, but the thought that this isn’t just someone having good ideas on the sidelines but solid policy proposals backed up by substantial experience at the community level is surely grounds for hope

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Ronnie Scott’s Shirley: page 76

Posted on 5 Jul 2023 | 8 comments

Ronnie Scott, Shirley (Hamish Hamilton 2023)

Ronnie Scott has played an important role in Australian culture over some decades, not least as founder of the literary magazine The Lifted Brow. So it’s only fair that his novels (Shirley is his second) should be reviewed with respect. It’s not that I don’t respect the book, but I’m definitely not part of its intended readership, so I don’t know that anything I have to say will be of much use.

You can read thoughtful and mostly laudatory reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald (Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen), the Guardian (Bec Kavanaugh), the Newtown Review of Books (Jessica Stewart) and Australian Book Review (Morgan Nunan), to give just a sample.

It’s a novel set firmly in Melbourne, Collingwood to be precise, mostly among people involved in the food industry, with unconventional familial and sexual relationships, as the bushfires of 2019–2020 are coming to an end and Covid-19 is taking hold. The unnamed female narrator (who is not the Shirley of the title – that’s a house) tells the story after Melbourne’s many Covid lockdowns. By about page 20 when the narrator does something of a sexual nature that seems to defy the laws of physics, I was reading without much pleasure. A passing, and to me incomprehensible, mention of people licking themselves, a few pages later left me pretty thoroughly alienated,. Nevertheless, I persisted. There’s a twist at the end that reveals a shape in what until then had seemed to be fairly pointless meanderings. For my taste that was far too little far too late, but my taste is evidently an outlier – see list of laudatory reviews above.

Currently when blogging about books I have a policy of taking a closer look at page 76, chosen for the arbitrary reason that it’s my age. On page 76 of Shirley, the narrator has answered a knock on her apartment door and opened it to her affluent downstairs neighbour Frankie, a ‘famous condiment maven’. After a little chat, she yields to unspoken pressure and invites her in. Then, on this page, the narrator resumes the scrambled tofu she was cooking when Frankie interrupted her, while Frankie asks about it: ‘Wait, what have you put in that? Why does it look so much like curds?’

It was just the Safeway brand of melty ‘mozzarella’, and I’d stolen Meera Sodha’s method of pouring a base of neutral oil, frying off some spices, mixing in the ingredients that had to be actually cooked, and then crushing some silken tofu in my hands – splatting it, really – along with the ‘final’ ingredients that just had to be wilted and warmed; when I’d read that recipe, in East, I’d scrambled tofu before, but somehow I hadn’t realised that the tofu didn’t need to be cooked, that it could be honoured as a soft, pillowy additive.

Today was a bit different, as Frankie had interrupted me just after I’d crushed in the tofu, but I supposed it was fine, as I’d decided on impulse to cook a hash brown in the same pan, and parts of it had broken up as I’d initially over-microwaved it from frozen. Coming back to the pan, I noticed these parts were blackening and sticking, and I chipped them off and incorporated them with a wooden spoon.

There’s quite a bit of vegan cooking in Shirley, mostly with meticulous acknowledgement of the source of the recipes. Meera Sodha’s East, acknowledged here, is subtitled ‘120 Vegetarian and Vegan Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing’.

There’s a school of thought that any passage of a novel needs to do one or preferably all of three things: move the plot forward, deepen our understanding of character, and develop theme or themes.

On first reading, nothing much happens on this page, but revisited when you’ve read the whole book, it astonishingly can be seen to do all three things.

In terms of plot, Frankie’s visit occurs almost exactly at the novel’s one-quarter mark. In conventional movie structure, this would be time for the second turning point, sometimes known as the Change of Plans. Indeed, Frankie’s moving into the narrator’s intimate space marks a major shift: Frankie is actively cultivating the narrator, for reasons that will be revealed much later. No doubt more sensitive readers pick up a weird vibe here that only gets weirder as the pages turn. (I was cleverly seduced into thinking it was all just part of a general weirdness.)

The narrator has already been established as a vegan foodie. This passage reinforces that aspect of her character, shows it in action. We learn more about Frankie too: this is the first time we see her outside of an environment where she is ‘the boss’. Here and on the next couple of pages, we see her as, well, a bit of a manipulator: praising, professing interest in what is after all pretty mundane, offering to help …

As far as thematic development goes, a key strand of the book is the narrator’s relationship with her mother, and her attention to the physical detail of food is in contrast to her celebrity-cook mother’s approach, which is mostly showbiz. Interestingly enough, the narrator silently judges Frankie a couple of pages later as ‘an entrepreneur by temperament but a cook only through opportunity and trade’. That is to say, bit the narrator’s mother and Frankie lack her authenticity around food.

The narrator’s veganism, made concrete here, has an important thematic value. I took it, disparagingly, to be part of the book’s inner-city cool vibe. But it’s more than that. It contrasts to a frequently mentioned photo, unexplained until the last pages, of the narrator’s mother holding a knife and spattered with blood. It’s a key piece of character rooted in plot.

So a lot is happening under the bland surface of page 76. For my taste, here and in the rest of the book, it’s all too far below the surface. Maybe on second reading I’d be alert to the subterranean shifts elements. But I don’t want to reread it. Its cultural terms of reference are largely alien to me. I know anything about vegan cookbooks. I don’t know any of the songs the characters listen to. I barely know West Brunswick from Fitzroy. I’ve never heard of Zachary Quinto. Celebrity cooks aren’t part of my internal pantheon, even ironically. Perhaps most importantly, it’s been a long time since I was dealing with the hopes, despairs and confusions of my 20s.

Your mileage may vary.

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