Category Archives: Books

Michael Crane’s Urban / Landscape / Ordinary Lives

Posted on 9 Jan 2025 | 13 comments

Michael Crane, Urban & Landscape / Ordinary Lives (Flying Island Books 2024)

Michael Crane organised Australia’s first poetry slam in 1991, and has been a significant figure in Melbourne’s spoken word scene ever since – or at least until his Wikipedia entry was updated, which may have been more than a decade ago until I added this book.

So this is a book of poems by a spoken word practitioner. That is, they are mainly poems for the stage rather than the page.

There are three sections: ‘Urban’, ‘Landscape’ and ‘Ordinary People’.

The first is mostly snapshots of life in inner-city Melbourne, with a couple of Brisbane scenes thrown in. The ones I like best are list poems. Take ‘The Emerald Hill Library Story Time’, for example, which lists many aspects of Clarendon Street that make it a tough place to live, and ends with the tenderness of storytime for children at the library; or ‘Hi Rise’, made up of fifteen couplets, each describingsomeone we take to be a resident of the building:

Marlene ran a tight ship
as her cat, Teddy, rubbed its tail between her legs.

Many visitors arrive unannounced,
cheating the security system.

Harry lives with his father
who he must treat like his child to manage him.

‘Landscape’ mostly moves out to the country, though in its final poem, ‘Life in the Big Smoke’, a poet from the country (a version of Michael Crane in his post-Wikipedia days?) visits the city, has a number of (non-)encounters and goes back ‘to where he came from’. This poem is enriched by being read in this context: its string of encounters echo similar ones on the first section, but the emotional impact is the opposite. In particular, it pairs nicely with ‘White noise of an urban landscape’, which begins, ‘The country life was not for him.’

The third section, ‘Ordinary Lives’ begins with ‘Introduction’, which lays out the section’s rationale, including this:

I find most people more interesting than me, but my job
is to document their success and failures, the moment of glory or
the times when they are alone without love.

The poems in this, as in all three sections, are mostly direct, straightforward, unassuming. They tend to name things without analysis or commentary. On the page they tend to be flat, but my sense is that they would come alive with the gesture, tone of voice and facial expression of spoken-word performance. They’re also mostly on the depressive side – fewer moments of glory, more times alone without love.

My arbitrary blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that corresponds to my age, which is currently 77. Page 77 of this book features one of the ‘Ordinary People’ poems, ‘On a plane to Cuba’:

This seems straightforward on a quick read, but there’s something unsettlingly off kilter about it – which may be another way of saying it couldn’t have been written by AI.

After I wrote that last sentence, I decided to test my assertion, and asked Chat GPT to write a poem about a woman who is about to leave her sleeping husband and go to Cuba. I’ve given the result at the bottom of this post, so as not to confuse it with real poetry*.

ChatGPT was worryingly proficient. But what it produced demonstrates that a mechanical aggregator just can’t do what a human poet can. The AI product has sharp images of the room, gives reasons for the woman’s choice of Cuba, and even has a last line that works, but none of it is surprising.

Michael Crane’s poem, on the other hand, pretends to be offering us clichés, but undermines them all the way. In the first ten lines, even as the poem evokes the woman’s yearning for elsewhere, it subtly, almost invisibly, distances itself from her. Does anyone in touch with reality think of Paris, City of Lights, as dimly lit? And though I’ve been in London when it snowed, surely ‘snow-covered footpaths’ is an idiosyncratic way of evoking that city. Her version of Cuba is similarly idiosyncratic. The ‘almost naked dancing women’ are a cliche from Rio rather than Havana. She seems to be vague about Cuban history. What is the ‘long war’? Maybe she’s thinking of Fidel wearing military fatigues? And, in the most telling split between the woman’s perspective and the poem’s, why does she find memories of war attractive?

In lines 13 to 15, the woman’s situation becomes clear:

She is going to catch a flight to Cuba 
as soon as she leaves the snoring man
who kidnapped her youth, ransomed her beauty.

Perhaps the woman’s idea of a ‘long war’ has come from the implied long time that she has been unhappily married. The definitive final line is hinted at here.

The poem continues to tread a fine balance between sympathy and – what is it? – scepticism. She takes no responsibility for whatever has one wrong with the relationship: there’s no indication that the man has been abusive – just that she took up with him when young and beautiful, and now feels the loss of those qualities (and we understand that she means he held her beauty to ransom rather than, what the words literally mean, that he paid a price to set it free). The feeling of loss is real, but we (or is it just me?) can’t help suspecting that she lacks insight.

Crucially, it’s her dreams that she packs along with supremely impractical clothing, and the last line strikes a superbly ambivalent note: all through the poem she has been dreaming of Cuba, and she heads off to ‘the songs of endless summer nights’, but really it might as well be dim Paris or snowy London, because what matters is 

days filled with the absence of him.

It’s not ‘She’s Leaving Home‘, with it’s brilliant empathy for both sides of the departure, but then what is?

I finished writing this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, as the sun was breaking through clouds after a day of heavy rain. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

*ChatGPT’s poem:

She watches him sleep, his chest rising and falling,
the steady rhythm of a man who never saw her breaking.
The sheets tangled around him,
a quiet fortress she once called home.
But now it feels like a cage.

Her bags are packed, a quiet rebellion in the corner.
Cuba waits—its colors, its heat,
its freedom, a place where she can feel her pulse again.
She runs her fingers over the window sill,
tracing the outlines of a life she no longer wants.

She should wake him, say goodbye,
but the words are too heavy,
the goodbyes too worn.
Instead, she steps lightly,
a ghost slipping past the threshold.

She breathes in the cool air of the morning,
the world opening wide in front of her.
And with every step,
she leaves behind the woman she used to be.

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Josh Tuininga’s We Are Not Strangers

Posted on 8 Jan 2025 | Leave a comment

Josh Tuininga, We Are Not Strangers (Abrams Comicarts 2023)

In December 1941, about 127,000 Japanese Americans lived in the continental USA. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Japan, about 120,000 of them, of whom about two-thirds were U.S. citizens,  were forcibly relocated and incarcerated in concentration camps.

This is not a secret history. In The Karate Kid, the young boy comes across references to the deaths of Mr Miyagi’s wife and child in a camp. Star Trek actor George Takei famously spent a number of years in one of the camps as a child, as told in the documentary To Be Takei (2014) and in They Called Us Enemy, a comic he co-wrote that was published in 2019. David Guterson’s novel Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) and the Scott Hicks film made from it refer to the incarcerations. (There are more examples on Wikipedia – I’ve just mentioned the ones that ring a bell for me.) Various presidents have expressed regret over the episode.

Josh Tuiininga’s comic comes at the subject as it played out in Seattle, from the point of view of Sephardic Jews. It begins in December 1987, with the funeral of Marco, the narrator’s grandfather. The funeral proceeds according to Sephardic tradition, but a lot of people turn up that the narrator has never seen before. Curious, he asks them how they knew his grandfather so well, and the story emerges.

During World War Two, as the Sephardic Jews of Seattle were watching the horrific events unfolding in Germany, they were suddenly confronted by a terrible injustice closer to home, as Japanese friends and neighbours were rounded up, their businesses forcibly closed, and their lives disrupted.

Page 77* marks a turning point. Marco and his family have just heard a radio announcement that ‘the Japanese population in America are potentially dangerous’ and are to be relocated or suffer criminal penalties:

In the first image on this spread, the woman walking away with a dismissive gesture is Marco’s mother, who has successfully escaped Germany and been smuggled into the USA by way of Canada. Her gesture signifies contempt for the edict, which she has just said is like what happened to Jews under the Nazis (not a view the comic necessarily endorses, but it shows the basis for solidarity between Jews and Japanese).

The left-hand page appears to portray Marco and his family as helpless bystanders. Evidently the Japanese American Citizens League recommended compliance for pretty much the reasons that Marco gives here: to resist would be to undermine the war effort. But the wordless right-hand page suggests something else. It is followed by two more wordless pages, a full page drawing of Marco at his desk beneath a clock showing one-thirty, and then a single drawing of a lit window in a dark suburban scape. We don’t now what these images mean precisely, but they remain as a question as the rest of the story unfolds: there’s a Passover sermon at the Synagogue; one of the Japanese children has her white friends turn against her; the Central District of Seattle is filled with remnants of Japanese presence; there are glimpses of life in the camps, and on their closure signs of persistent anti-Japanese sentiment are everywhere.

But it turns out that what Marco was doing in his study that night was working out how he could safeguard his friends’ homes and businesses. When they return home, he gives them envelopes full of rent money, deeds and all that is needed to help restore their lives. And he has done it for as many families as he could manage. Only at his funeral do his own family find out what he has done.

‘Why did he keep it a secret?’ the narrator asks, and over a series of images that show Marco with family and his Japanese fishing friend in 1945, 1953, 1968, 1979 and then (his empty chair at the family table) 1987, the captions read:

Maybe he thought he would get into trouble.
Perhaps he wished he could have done more.
Or, maybe …
… he just wanted to forget all about it …
… and spend his time on more important things.

That last line is a caption between two images, one of Marco as an old man at a family meal, the other (echoing images from early in the book) of him and his Japanese friend fishing together and laughing.

It’s a powerful story, elegantly told in a palettte of mainly warm browns and pale blues. Though a note at the beginning assures us that this is a work of fiction, it also says the story is based on ‘the oral histories of many’.

It’s pure coincidence that I have read this so soon after Yael van der Wouden’s novel The Safekeep. That novel hinges on the loss of property and livelihood by Jews in the Netherlands under the Nazis – so that those who did return from camps found their houses occupied and their personal items now used by strangers. That almost certainly happened to many Japanese-Americans, but this story demonstrates how it could have been different, and that in at least some cases it was different.

It would have been impossible for me to read this book without thinking of North Queensland. My grandfather was a police magistrate. The family story is that because he had learned Italian he was brought back from his posting in Brisbane to supervise the internment of Italians during World War Two. That internment was on a smaller scale – 5000 men were taken from their families to internment camps in New South Wales and South Australia, and at least twice as many were put to work in remote areas building roads and rail, and working in mines. Many were naturalised Australian citizens.For the most part, only the adult men were taken away: the results were devastating for Italian farmers, and families were disrupted.

The ABC ran a story in 2020 marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the War (link here). The excellent Babinda museum tells one man’s story – a man who, characteristically, downplays the difficulties he faced. The official archival records of the internments have been made public for some decades now, but as far as I have been able to tell the many stories – from Innisfail, Ingham, Garradunga, Daradgee, Boogan – have yet to be told.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, peoples whose own stories of mistreatment in times of war have yet to be fully told. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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Yael van der Wouden’s Safekeep at the book club

Posted on 7 Jan 2025 | 3 comments

Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: As I mentioned in my post about Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square, this book has a general strategy in common with a number of other books I’ve read recently – a personal relationship as way of drawing the reader into a big public event.

In this case the personal relationship is sexual. At times I felt like averting my eyes, as if I was intruding on intensely intimate moments.

The book is told from the point of view of a woman who lives alone in the house she has kind-of inherited from her parents in postwar Netherlands. Her brother actually owns of the house but lets her live in it. The story kicks off when he pressures her to allow his girlfriend to stay with her while he goes away for work. The two women are very prickly with each other at first: the owner is prim and obsessive about neatness, and her begrudged guest is an apparently easygoing woman of the world. Bit by bit we realise that the narrator is constantly aware of the other woman’s bodily presence, and eventually the dam breaks and there are many pages of enthusiastic sex.

There are hints along the way that something else is going on. In the book’s very first paragraph, for instance, the uptight host finds a ceramic shard buried in the cottage garden. She recognises a piece from her mother’s precious dinner set, but has no memory of any of those plates ever having been broken. This is the first of a number of hints that there is something about the house that has never been acknowledged. More telling perhaps are childhood memories of strangers knocking at the door and her mother ignoring them.

I guess I knew from the beginning roughty where things were going, and even during the scenes of passion I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It does drop, most satisfactorily.

I loved this book.

After the meeting: I wasn’t alone in loving it.

This book group, the majority of whose members are Lesbian, has long had a rule that no Lesbian books were allowed unless the Lesbianism was incidental to the plot. Well, this book smashed that rule to bits, but it did it with such grace and integrity and good writing that not even the Chief Rulemaker minded.

Though we all loved the book, we spent some time discussing the ending. Was it too neat, too quickly achieved, too much out of character? It’s hard to blog about endings but I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that two possibilities were raised in defence: first, it’s like the endings to Shakespeare’s comedies – you’re not meant to think this could really have happened but it’s satisfying to imagine it as a kind of justice; second, the apparent change of personality involved could be accounted for by the transformative power of the passionate sexual experience – certainly it was transformative, and maybe even more so than obvious. If you’ve read the book, you’ll have opinions of your own.

The Book Club met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, land that has never been ceded. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square at the book club

Posted on 6 Jan 2025 | 3 comments

Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square (Swift Press 2024)

Before the meeting: On page 411 of this novel, the narrator-protagonist, a student at Beijing University, posts an application for an exchange program at a Canadian university. She goes to one of the bars on campus, and then:

The enormity of what I had done began to sink in.

A few pages later, sensations flash across her mind ‘like lightening’, and a few pages further on there is a lake, where a turquoise glow

expanded outward as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the tawny ridges of ochre mountains were flushed at their foothills with dark streaks of wild grass and moss.

The fact that I am brought up short by such moments (enormity is something big and horrible, not something like a major life decision; lightning is what flashes; if the water goes as far as the eye can see, how can you describe what can be seen beyond it?) may say more about me than about the book, but I’m pretty sure if I’d been gripped by the narrative I wouldn’t have noticed them.

If the pseudonymous author is who she says she is, this is an autobiographically inflected story of a young woman caught up in the student uprising in China in 1989. As such, it commands respect.

By coincidence, it shares something of a strategy with three other books I have read recently, telling a story with a tight focus on relationships and then widening out into a huge public event or issue. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck is a tales of a toxic relationship between an older man and a young woman that culminates in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is an adolescent boy-boy love story that becomes a retelling of The Iliad. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (blog post coming soon) is a steamy Lesbian romance that turns out to be about what happens to property confiscated from Jews in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation.

In this book, the personal story lacks a clear or interesting focus. The death of a beloved grandmother, an embittered mother, a pallid teenage sex life (though the first unsatisfactory moment of sexual intimacy is vividly realised), and quirky university encounters all compete for attention. And the otherwise powerful Tiananmen Square narrative is undermined by giving the final moment to a twist that’s silly, and not in a good way.

I am glad I’ve read the book. It’s an important story. It’s just that at the sentence level, which is where I mostly live in books, it trudges.

After the meeting: We discussed this book along with The Safekeep. It was the Book Club’s celebratory end-of-year meeting with exchange of gifts in a restaurant, so discussion of the books was perhaps less extensive than usual.

All but one of us had read the whole book, and given that our meeting had been postponed twice because of illnesses, it was clear that it was lack of interest rather than lack of time that had led to the one non-completion. Generally, the completers all agreed that it was too long – it would have been a better book without a lot of the earlier family stories. Not everyone was convinced by the implied eye-witness status of the author – that claim is undermined by what looks like an arbitrary and ahistorical invention at the very end (and who knows, but we might yet be proved wrong in judging the final moment that way).

The book’s strongest advocate felt (if I remember correctly) that the complex mundaneness of the family story and the story of teenage emotional entanglements was the book’s strength: it took the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 away from the abstract an showed them irrupting onto the lives of otherwise ordinary people. While others agreed that that’s how the book works, they (we!) felt that the narrator was peripheral to those big events, so her account of them doesn’t add substantially to what we already know from other sources.

We enjoyed The Safekeep a lot more.

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2024 End of year list 5: Blog traffic

Posted on 5 Jan 2025 | 2 comments

In case you’ve had just about enough of my end of year lists, be reassured: This is the last one, and I don’t expect you to read it – it’s mainly so I’ll have a record.

Here are the posts that attracted most clicks on my blog in 2024:

  1. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (October 2023, 1618 clicks)
  2. The Book Club and Paul Murray’s Bee Sting (April 2024, 775 clicks)
  3. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023, 744 clicks)
  4. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020, 625 clicks)
  5. Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (January 2019, 597 clicks)
  6. Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren, the book club, page 77 (March 2024, 533 clicks)
  7. Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe (July 2019, 412 clicks)
  8. Robert Alter’s Psalms (September 2020, 365 clicks)
  9. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and the Book Club (April 2024, 364 clicks)
  10. Rebecca Huntley’s Italian Girl (April 2022, 357 clicks)

Ocean Vuong’s book was at the top of the list for most of the year, and then news of the movie of Small Thiings Like These sent a lot of clicks to that post. Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus dominated the list for years, but has now dropped off altogether. Mary Oliver, Ellen van Neerven and Robert Alter are the stayers.

One more bit of nerdiness. Here’s WordPress’s list of my all-time top ten posts. Apart from changing positions, the main change from last year is that Philip Larkin got bumped by Claire Keegan:

  1. Travelling with the Art Student (November 2014, 3558 hits)
  2. The Book Group and Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus (June 2018, 2721 hits)
  3. (Re-)reading Kevin Gilbert’s poetry (April 2012, 2430 hits)
  4. Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (April 2020, 1841 hits)
  5. Bran Nue Dae (January 2010, 1805 hits)
  6. Mary Oliver’s House of Light (April 2020, 1784 hits)
  7. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (October 2023, 1676 hits)
  8. The book group’s Harp in the South (February 2011, 1431 hits)
  9. Jasper Jones at the Book Group (May 2010, 1352 hits)
  10. Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (June 2013, 1236 hits)

That’s it. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to those statistics. Some of you I know IRL, some I’ve met through email etc, some only in the comments section, some I know only as anonymous clickers. I’m happy that you’ve visited the blog. Come again.

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2024 End of Year List 4: Books

Posted on 4 Jan 2025 | 6 comments

The Emerging Artist now keeps a record of the books she reads so she can easily whip up a list for me at this time of year. Here are her favourite reads from 2024 in her own words (links to LibraryThing pages or, at her request, to my blog post when there is one):

Fiction

Hisham Matar, My Friends (Viking 2024)
I enjoyed Hisham Matar’s previous books, though I wasn’t enthusiastic about them as they often felt repetitive, and more like unreliable memoir than fiction. My Friends continues to draw on his life, but it feels more like a story that examines what it is to be an exile in a time of radical upheaval.

Annie Ernaux, A Woman’s Story (translated by Tanya Leslie 1991, Fitzcarraldo Editions 2024)
I read Annie Ernaux’s The Years before I got to this very slim volume, so I came to it with high expectations. I wasn’t disappointed. In such concise prose Ernaux describes the details of one woman’s life, and iin doing so conjures up a broader world.

Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything (Viking 2024)
This continues the stories of a number of Elizabeth Strout’s characters, bringing them together as they deal with death, ageing, love and lust. She writes with wit and kindness.

Niamh Mulvey, The Amendments (Picador 2024)
A new Irish writer for me. I hope she writes a lot more. This is a generational feminist tale about a family of women, dealing with the way issues of reproductive rights governed women’s lives before Ireland shifted from Catholic dominance – a shift made because of women demanding change.

Donal Ryan, Heart, Be at Peace (Doubleday 2024)
I had read two previous Donal Ryan novels, both of which I loved. In this one he continues to create the sense of Irish village community and disunity in the context of the Celtic Tiger and its collapse. Told from multiple perspectives, it builds a picture of complex relationships.

Non fiction

Mark McKenna, From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (Melbourne University Publishing 2016)
Published in 2016, this is still a wonderful way to learn about First Nations and settler interactions. McKenna writes compelling history. These relatively short pieces include the pearl industry in Western Australia, the Barrup Peninsula petroglyphs and mining, early failed attempts to establish a colony in northern Australia, and the brutality of the Palmerston goldfields in north Queensland. They are written with a focus on First Nations agency, and they attempt to understand how colonisation played out in each specific time and place.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Penguin 2023)
I’m still reading this, having put it down during the US elections as much of what Naomi Klein describes was playing out in the headlines. It’s a fascinating enquiry into the nature of truth, and the way fakery has become entrenched in political discourse.

From me

I can never pick a favourite or best book. My favourite is always the one I’m reading right now, unless the one I’m reading is the book I hate most in the world. Some highlights of 2024 were:

  • Montaigne’s Essays: I have read four or five pages most mornings since the beginning of March, and will have finished the book in a couple of weeks. He has been a great person to start the day with (apart from the Emerging Artist, of course)
  • Blue Mars, the final book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy has finally made it from my TBR shelf, and it was a most satisfactory experience
  • the poetry of John Levy, who showed up in my comments to share his enthusiasm for Ken Bolton’s poetry, and offered to send me a copy of his own book. I’m so glad I accepted the offer
  • I read more of Annie Ernaux: if ever I write a memoir, I hope I can manage to be at least slightly Ernauxian

To get all nerdy, I read:

  • roughly 83 books altogether (counting journals but only some children’s books)
  • 34 novels
  • 21 books of poetry
  • 5 comics
  • 6 books in translation – 3 from French (counting Montaigne’s Essays), 1 each from German, Japanese and Chinese
  • 7 books for the Book Group, whose members are all men
  • 12 books for the Book Club, where I’m the only man (two of them to be reviewed after tomorrow night’s meeting)
  • counting editors and comics artists, 45 books by women, 46 by men
  • 3 books by First Nations writers, and
  • 11 books by other writers who don’t belong to the White global minority.

And the TBR shelf is just as crowded as it was 12 months ago.

Happy New Year to all. May 2025 turn out to be a lot less dire than it’s looking at the moment, and (to repeat my wish from last year) may fossil fuels at last be left in the ground. May we all keep our hearts open, our minds engaged, and may we all talk to strangers.

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Rodney Hall’s Vortex

Posted on 31 Dec 2024 | 11 comments

Rodney Hall, Vortex (Picador 2024)

I haven’t read anything by Rodney Hall since the early 70s, and then it was just one book of poetry and one novella. Since then he has had thirteen more novels published, as well as ten more poetry collections, a collection of short fictions, two biographies – and non-fiction, an opera libretto and radio plays (not an exhaustive list), not to mention that he has won any number of prestigious prizes and accolades.

So it may be because I’m coming late to his writing that Vortex had me feeling off kilter pretty much from start to finish. On any page there’s something to enjoy, appreciate, puzzle over or be wowed by. But I don’t think I ever had a sense of the book as a whole.

There’s Brisbane in 1954: the Queen’s visit, a spectacular water-weed infestation, an exhibition of Tollund Man in the museum, a cyclone, the aftermath of the US army’s stay there in World War Two, the beginnings of ASIO domestic spying. Vladimir Petrov makes a cameo appearance. Entertaining endnotes underline the historicity of some of these features and events, even while asserting that the book is fiction.

And there’s 1954 beyond Brisbane: the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Royal Charter for North Borneo, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, and a boatload of refugees.

There’s Compton Gillespie, a young, bookish working-class teenager who befriends Beckmann, a German man, formerly a member of the Hitler Youth, possibly homosexual, who dances with women for money. Any sexual tension in the novel is between these characters.

There’s Paloma, a Spanish countess who presides over a table of European migrants and refugees at the Colony Club, where the conversation is witty, urbane, and mildly satirical of the host culture.

Paloma’s husband, a crude member of the public service with aspirations to gentility, is involved in cloak and dagger intrigue with the Americans while playing some kind of role in making sure the Queen’s visit goes well.

Vassily Bogdanovich Hmelnitsky, ‘thirty years a homeless vagrant’, wanders the streets of Brisbane.

There are flash-forwards. John Howard’s ‘We will decide’ speech, or near enough, turns up in the dialogue. Scott Morrison is a mysterious presence in someone’s dream.

These narrative strands intersect: the boy takes a photo of the countess; the vagrant takes shelter in the Colony Club during a downpour; the queen speaks to the boy’s mother on her hospital visit. And there’s a fairly improbable tying up of at least some threads at the end. But it’s hard for the mind to find purchase.

And maybe that’s the point. Apart from the first, each chapter and subsection of a chapter begins in mid-sentence without a capital letter: ‘or how to kill so much time?’ (Chapter 2); ‘and because none of Professor Antal Bródy’s three doctorates is recognized by the University of Queensland’ (Chapter 3); ‘because the night is warm and splendid with stars’ (Chapter 6); and so on. Similarly, they all (including the final one) end mid-sentence and without a full stop. There’s a constant sense that we aren’t getting the full story: we are seeing and hearing only moments from a great, complex, uncontainable whole.

The received version of 1950s Australia is that it was boring, monocultural, conformist. This book challenges that view. Its sympathetic characters are all in one way or another non-conformist and questioning, and its Brisbane is part of the great movement of people around the globe that began after World War Two and continues until now. I think that’s the vortex of the title. Here’s a paragraph from page 230:

from an observation balloon the vast seething mass of displaced persons is caught and processed by still photographs. From a thousand feet up an aerial platform provides intelligence pinpointing any breakouts in the movement of the desperate massed figures below. Unseen analysts make their scrupulous adjustments

This paragraph is typically complex.

First, it wrenches our attention from its immediate context, in which Beckmann is being challenged about his relationship with Compton, to the general question of refugees. There’s a suggestion that the same thing happens at different scales: Beckmann’s roommate questions him, the unseen analysts do their work. This movement from Brisbane to international scenes happens regularly in the novel.

Second, it draws attention to the time-specific nature of the book: in 2024, readers are used to surveillance – in 1954, this paragraph insists, it was already a thing, but it was much more primitive, depending on still photographs rather than video streams, and observation balloons rather than satellites or even spy planes.

Third – and this is how I first read it – it suggests something about the book itself. Its true subject is ‘the vast seething mass of displaced persons’, but it captures and processes it, not by still photographs, but by word sketches, anecdotes, scraps of dialogue, fractures narrative arcs. It does it, not from a distance of a thousand feet, but in close-up, paying attention to the details of people’s lives.

I can see that, and respect it, but in the reading I was mostly unengaged.

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Journal Catch-up 27: Overland Nº254

Posted on 29 Dec 2024 | 2 comments

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland Nº 254 (Summer 2023)
(Only the editorial is online at the time of writing – so I haven’t included links, sorry!)

The first thing you notice about this issue of Overland is its design – an austere black and red cover and monochrome throughout, a smaller format, and surely the paper stock is cheaper than we’ve become used to. Could this be a sign of a funding crisis?

Of course there may be a funding crisis – this is an Australian literary journal after all. But there’s a definite retro aesthetic to the new look. Editors Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk call it an ‘archivally informed design’, and explain that it’s the first of four issues to mark Overland‘s seventieth year of publication. The internal illustrations are all from the archives, and include stunning ink drawings by Noel Counihan from the 1970s and Rick Amor from the late 80s and early 90s. Fabulously, page 128 features a Bruce Petty cartoon from 1976.

The nostalgia stops with the look. The words are all 2024.

I recommend the whole issue, but want to single out two articles that make me sorry so little of this content has made it to Overland‘s website. They are ‘“A State of Waste”: Myall Creek, the Sydney Herald and the Foundations of Australian Capitalism’ by Jeff Sparrow, and the anonymous essay, ‘Writing after … October 7’.

I’ve recently read how the 16th century Papal ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ (Wikipedia entry here) was explicitly invoked to justify dispossession and genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere well into the 19th century. Jeff Sparrow’s magisterial essay offers a very different account of how similar acts were justified in Australia. It’s a clear and cogent history of how the closing of the commons in 18th century Britain led to a new understanding of ‘ownership’ of land, which was applied ruthlessly by the settlers in Australia. The content may not be startlingly new, but Sparrow’s copious quotation from the Sydney Herald in the first part of the 19th century is, for me at least, revelatory. It’s not that the way First Nations people related to the land was strange to the settlers. It was all too familiar:

Like the British commoners, Indigenous people clearly did ‘make use’ of the land. They lived in a use-value society, tending their country to encourage the animals and plants they required. The Herald, however, understood ‘productivity’ in capitalist terms, with use values significant only insofar as they generated profit. (Page 67)

The essay spells out the way this thinking leads shockingly, but logically to the minds of the Sydney Herald editors, to justification of massacres.

What can I say? If you get a chance, read this essay.

The author of the other stand-out essay is a person of Arab background, writing in the context of conversations with Arab and Palestinian friends who work in academic or cultural contexts. They describe how they have always held in their mind the history of Palestine as ‘a bustling site of plurality and coexistence’. The establishment of the state of Israel in the nakba put an end to that condition but it has remained as a vision of possibility.

Jews worldwide were shaken by the visceral hatred shown for them in the Hamas attacks on 7 October last year. Palestinians and Arabs have been no less shaken by the hatred and disregard for them that subsequent events have demonstrated. The multi-religious and plural world of pre-1948 is now unthinkable. ‘We had not realised until this carnage started,’ the author writes, ‘how dehumanised Palestinians and Arabs are in the eyes of most Israelis.

There’s more. Back here, well-intended and well-informed colleagues have been carefully ‘balanced’ when discussing the situation of Palestinians in Israel, in large part because of not wanting to be seen as antisemitic. The author and friends have believed that if a point came when Israel unleashed its full fury on Palestinians their colleagues would take a stand. But it has happened, and many have not changed their stance:

It is not hyperbole to say we are grieving as we watch our kin annihilated on an hourly basis … We feel neglected, betrayed and discarded. We have always stood in solidarity with the causes these colleagues are most passionate about because those causes are ours too. Why isn’t Palestine their cause? (Page 49)

There’s another fine Palestine-related essay – providing devastating perspective on the brouhaha over three actors wearing a keffiyah at a preview of The Seagull in Sydney last year. But it’s the anonymous writer’s cry from the heart that strikes home.

There’s poetry – including the winners of the 2023 Judith Wright Poetry Prize and an excerpt from Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.

There are short stories, of which my favourite is ‘Who Rattles the Night’ by Annie Zhang, a comic ghost story that won the Neilma Sidney Fiction Prize.

I finished writing this blog post in the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean and surrounded by birdsong. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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Reading with the grandies 34: Wings of Fire, Tabby McTat, Dog Man

Posted on 27 Dec 2024 | 6 comments

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about my grandchildren’s reading. Both do quite a lot.

I’ll write about the four-year-old another time. For now, I’ll just say that he loves Tabby McTat by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, which I blogged about four years ago, when his big sister was also enamoured of it.

Our newly-turned-seven-year-old has become a comics reader. Unlike the Donald Ducks and Phantoms of my childhood, her comics are little books, and seem to be mainly adapted from series of non-graphic novels. Partly as dutiful grandfather and partly (mostly?) as committed reader of comics, I’ve read two books from her current obsessions. (I did dip into a Babysitters’ Club title, but couldn’t make myself read the whole thing.)

Dav Pilkey, Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls (Graphix 2019)

I’d heard of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants, but had no idea until I looked him up on Wikipedia that he had received the prestigious Caldecott Honor Award (in 1997, for The Paperboy) or that he had been named Comics Industry Person of the Year in 2019. His first name, I also learned there, doesn’t come from a non-Anglo heritage but from a misspelled name tag at a fast food outlet.

This is the seventh of the Dog Man books. It’s good fun.

The first pages explain that the hero has had a head transplant. His new head came from a dog, and now as he continues with his work as a police officer, his doggy abilities and instincts often come in handy. Sadly, and hilariously, they also cause problems.

In this book, whenever Dog Man comes close to making an arrest, the bad guy throws a ball and he is compelled to chase after it.

Having written that much, I realise that I didn’t actually finish reading the book. In an increasinglty rare treat for both of us, I read it to my granddaughter until life made other demands. I enjoyed what I did read, and will try to sneak a further look if I can find it among the chaos of books in their bedroom.

Tui T. Sutherland, Barry Deutsch, Mike Holmes & Maarta Laiho, Wings of Fire: The Dragonet Prophecy, the graphic novel (Graphix, an imprint of Scholastic, 2018)

Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series is a major phenomenon in YA fantasy. The first (non-graphic) novel, The Dragonet Prophecy, was published in 2012, and has been followed by fourteen more, plus two stand-alones, a number of novellas (‘Winglets’), and other spin-offs. The series is currently being adapted into ‘graphic novels’ (I prefer to call them comics) by Barry Deutsch, with art by Mike Holmes and colour by Maarta Laiho. Evidently the sequential art version makes the stories accessible to a younger readership, as my granddaughter has devoured the first six volumes. I have just read the first.

In the world of this novel, intelligent dragons are the dominant species. There are at last six dragon nations / subspecies, each with its own powers. A war has been raging for twenty years – a war of succession, sparked by the death of a queen at the hands of a Scavenger (a creature we recognise as human). There is a prophecy that five dragons ‘who hatch at brightest night’ will end the war and bring about peace.

The story begins with the hatching of those five baby dragons (‘dragonets’). They spend their early years imprisoned in a cave, protected from the outside violence and trained for their future task by formidable adult dragons, the Talons of Peace, who don’t much like them. They bicker like siblings, study the history of the war, and test their diverse powers. Like many institutionalised children, they form powerful bonds of affection and are fiercely loyal to each other. As you’d expect, they escape from the cave and adventures ensue.

Rather than give more detailed summary, I’ll stick to my practice of looking at page 77:

It would be interesting to compare this with the equivalent section of the original novel. Certainly it would take a lot of words (three thousand for these three pictures?) to convey as much information about character and to move the plot along so far. (The next page does include aquite a bit more explanatory dialogue.)

The large dragon at the top is Scarlet, one of the powerful queens who not only wages war but is committed to keeping it going for its own sake. She knows of the prophecy and, having captured the dragonets, is out to humiliate and destroy them. She stands on a platform that overlooks an arena where, for her own entertainment, she stages fights to the death between dragons who have been taken prisoner.

The small, brightly coloured dragon in the intricate cage is Glory, one of the five dragonets. She is a rain dragon, despised by everyone except her companions as beautiful but lazy and generally useless. Scarlet has not condemned her to gladiatorial combat, but has arranged her as an artwork. In keeping with her reputation, she is apparently sleeping (no spoiler to tell you that she is actually wide awake, biding her time).

The square-snouted character at bottom right is Clay, a mud dragon, another dragonet and this book’s central character. He is currently chained to the top of a pillar overlooking the arena with his wings constrained, destined to fight and, Scarlet expects, die violently. So much of his character is revealed in this one frame: though he has just discovered his own precarious situation, his attention goes completely to Glory – alarmed at her vulnerability but also with sibling irritation at her passivity.

To tell the truth, part of my reason for reading this book was what an unsympathetic observer might call moral panic: I had heard my granddaughter exclaim from the seat of the car, ‘Why is there so much blood in this book?’ This is a girl who recoils from even the mention of blood in real life. Having read the book, I’m guessing that this young reader is in there for the story and at worst puts up with the so far extremely stylised violence and gore, at best uses it to work through some of her own fears and anxieties.

I don’t know if I’ll read on, but I’m tempted.

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Montaigne progress report 9

Posted on 17 Dec 2024 | 1 comment

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech)
– part way through Book 3, essay 5, ‘On Some lines from Virgil’ to part way through Book 3, essay 10, ‘On restraining your will’

This post was due more than a week ago, but life in general made other plans for me. With a couple of lapses, though, I have consistently read four or five pages of Montaigne’s Essays each morning.

I won’t even try to summarise what I’ve read in the last six weeks. I’ll just mention that ‘On some lines from Virgil’ continued to be fascinating on the subject of sex and gender; in a piece with the innocuous title ‘On coaches’ Montaigne denounces the atrocities of the Spanish colonisation of Central and South America; in ‘On the disadvantages of high rank’ he pities those whose social position means no one will disagree with them, because they are deprived of the joys of conversation.

And then there’s ‘On vanity’, a long essay that made me fear age-related cognitive decline was catching up with me. As with many of the essays, ‘On some lines from Virgil’ being a prime example, this one’s title gives you no idea of its true subject. But in this case, I couldn’t tell if it even had a main subject. He writes about travel, about death (a lot about death), about how much he loves Rome. He explains why he’s glad he has no sons. He quotes at length from the document granting him Roman citizenship. He’s like a dog snapping – in slow motion – at whatever fly of an idea crosses his mental line of vision. But in the middle of it all, he has one of the passages that remind you that he is inventing the form of the personal essay – and k ows exactly what he’s doing:

There are works of Plutarch in which he forgets his theme, or in which the subject is treated only incidentally, since they are entirely padded out with extraneous matter … My God! what beauty there is in such flights of fancy and in such variation, especially when they appear fortuitous and casual. It is the undiligent reader who loses my subject, not I. In a corner somewhere you can always find a word or two on my topic, adequate despite being squeezed in tight. I change subject violently and chaotically. My pen and my mind both go a-roaming. If you do not want more dullness you must accept a touch of madness.

‘It is the undiligent reader who loses my subject, not I.’ I’ve been put in my place.

He defends his lack of coherence by applying to himself Plato’s description of a poet as someone who:

pours out in rapture, like the gargoyle of a fountain, all that comes to his lips, without weighing it or chewing it; from him there escape things of diverse hue, contrasting substance and jolting motion.

I don’t know that anyone seriously thinks that’s what poets do, but the idea that a reader needs to be ‘diligent’ to do justice to some writing has still got a lot of life in it, probably even more than it did in Montaigne’s day. He goes on to say he doesn’t stitch things together ‘for the benefit of weak and inattentive ears’:

Where is the author who would rather not be read at all than to be dozed through or dashed through? … If taking up books were to mean taking them in; if glancing at them were to mean seeing into them; and skipping through them to mean grasping them: then I would be wrong to make myself out to be quite so totally ignorant as I am. Since I cannot hold my reader’s attention by my weight, manco male [it is no bad thing] if I manage to do so by my muddle.

So, just as he’s getting tetchy with us for being lazy, he acknowledges that he’s a pretty lazy reader himself. And having claimed that his apparent incoherence is actually poetic brilliance, he now calls it a muddle.

Oh, and in the middle of all that charming back-and-forth between grumpiness and self-deprecation, there’s this lovely, enigmatic line:

Poetry is the original language of the gods.

I’m not sorry I gave up French Honours in 1968 because I found Montaigne almost as unreadable as Rabelais. I’m enjoying reading him now, in translation, much more than I possibly could have in the original when I was 22.

This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where the days are getting hotter and more humid. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation.

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