Roald Dahl, The Twits (1980) Lilja Sigurðardóttir, translator Quentin Bates, Cold as Hell (2022)
I spent the Easter weekend with family at Bawley Point on the south coast of New South Wales. The Emerging Artist and I drove there from Sydney with two grandchildren aged 4 and 7, and came home alone. On the way down we had a great time playing Car Bingo on sheets designed by the EA, and when the excitement of seeing the umpteenth cow had waned we listened on Audible to The Twits. On the way back, without grandchildren, we listened to the rest of Cold as Hell, which we had begun on a previous trip.
When I was first interviewed for a job at The School Magazine, Australia’s venerable literary journal for children, I was asked to name some children’s books that I enjoyed. Among others, I mentioned The Twits and The BFG, both by Roald Dahl. Kath Hawke, the magazine’s editor, raised a belligerent eyebrow. ‘Oh, you like them, do you?’ she asked, and went on to talk about the relish with which both books describe people humiliating and physically hurting each other. I scoffed at such concerns, identified with the relish, and didn’t get the job. (I was, however, placed on an eligibility list and eventually spent nearly two decades working there.)
Hearing The Twits again 40 decades later, I sympathise more with Kath’s view. Two repulsive individuals play mean tricks on each other and torment birds and animals in their power. The animals and birds take an appropriate revenge. End of story. It was refreshing once, and maybe still is for young people, especially those for whom ‘poo poo’ is a dependably witty response to almost anything. Maybe I’m just being all 21st century, but while I find the description of Mr Twit gleefully disgusting, I wonder if that of Mrs Twit isn’t marred by an extra layer of visceral misogyny.
According to an online bookseller juggernaut Cold as Hell is the first book in ‘an addictive, nerve-shattering new series’.
Áróra Jónsdóttir, a twenty-something freelance financial investigator, flies to her native Iceland to check on her sister Ísafold. Ísafold has been in an abusive relationship and the two sisters have recently fallen out. Áróra soon realises that Ísafold hasn’t just been avoiding her, but has disappeared.
What can I say? Iceland is cold. Áróra uncovers some financial skulduggery when on a break from searching for Ísafold. There’s a weird character called Grimur (I think), an African refugee named Omar, a police detective who is some kind of uncle to Áróra. Áróra’s mother flies in from London to share the anxiety. There’s a little bit of sex and a little bit of violence. It all turns out pretty much as you’d expect, with a slight twist, as you’d expect.
It felt like a novel equivalent of Nordic Noir TV, and given that The Áróra Investigations is a series, it may turn up soon on content-hungry streaming. It passed the time pleasantly enough, but my nerves weren’t shattered and I’m not addicted.
We listened to these books while travelling through Dharawal country. I have written the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge Elders past and present, and thank them for their custodianship of these lands over millennia.
George Megalogenis takes Australia’s federal polling statistics and renders them into readable, even enjoyable prose. In this Quarterly Essay, he reads the data from elections since John Howard’s time up to the present moment, and attempts to make sense of the current political landscape.
The global financial crisis, the coming of the teals, Covid, the defeat of the Voice referendum, the genocide in Gaza, housing, the climate emergency, the hollowing out of the ABC: all are grist to the mill of this nuanced inside-baseball analysis.
The essay and the correspondence in Quarterly Essay 97 probably make a significant contribution to our general understanding of Australian electoral politics. But as I was reading it, I couldn’t help but be aware that it was written at the end of 2024, and if a week is a long time in politics, then the four months that have passed between then and now amount to an epoch. Even the correspondence was written before Donald J. Trump’s ‘Independence Day’. Who knows if, as Megalogenis projects, there will be a hung parliament in May? And if there is, who knows if he is right that it ‘offers perhaps our last best chance to restore purpose to our politics – and policymaking’?
Still, I admire and enjoy Magalogenis’ ability to communicate complex matter in a readable way. Page 47, which begins a section on the level of trust in government, includes an example:
In the wake of the 2010 federal election, I pinpointed the 2001 campaign as the turning point to a more trivial politics. John Howard responded to warnings of electoral doom with a panic of handouts in the first half of that year. … None of the bribes offered to voters in this period came with offsetting savings for the budget. They left a maze of entitlements and distorted market signals which stored up problems for the future, most notably in the housing sector, where prices boomed beyond the reach of the middle class, and in public infrastructure, which could not keep up with population growth. Labor’s unforced policy errors on climate change and the mining tax in 2010 felt like the culmination of a decade-long trend which reduced the relationship between government and citizen to the question: how can I buy your support?
That general trend to trivialisation was interrupted first by the global financial crisis which, Megalogenis argues, created ‘a bubble of trust in our leaders and institutions, which burst once the existential threat passed’, triggering what he calls a ‘new super-cycle in our politics – pro-incumbent in the crisis and anti-incumbent in the recovery’.
There’s pleasure in discerning patterns of this sort. There may also be some usefulness.
In the correspondence, the stand-out for me is Judith Brett. She observes that the major political parties have been hollowed out, as their membership has declined and they have become ‘professional electoral machines’. When memberships were much larger, debate, negotiation and compromise took place within the parties. These debates connected with the lived experience, interests and prejudice of a range of electors. And when the legislation reached the parliament it was assured safe passage by the government’s majority:
What is happening, I think, is that the debate, negotiation and consensus-building is shifting from inside the parties back to the parliament, where they were for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … The conflicts of interest will be more publicly visible than they are when the resolution takes place inside the parties. This will be a magnet for media speculation and give the impression of dysfunction, but in my opinion it is no cause for alarm. The public will have a clearer view of the interests and arguments at play, and the government will have to negotiate. But it does not mean the end of effective legislation.
We’ll see.
I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where the day started out with rich blue sky, turned to heavy rain, fined up, and as I press ‘Publish’ is beginning to rain once more.. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.
Before the meeting: It’s unlikely that the group would have read The Visionaries if we chose books by consensus. But The Chooser has spoken and we’re out of our comfort zones.
It’s a hard book to describe. Without anything by way of preamble or general argument, it plunges straight into its story. The first chapter, ‘Sparks: 1943’, introduces the book’s four subjects: four quite different women writers, each heroic in her own way, poised to take a major leap forward In the midst of the horrors of the Second World War. As with each of the book’s eight chapters and Coda, the chapter is subtitled:
Beauvoir is in the mood, Weil in a trance, Rand in a fury, and Arendt in a nightmare.
And the four philosophers are introduced:
Simone de Beauvoir, aged 35, is in occupied France in her famously unconventional ‘family’ with Jean-Paul Sartre, with ‘better things to do than worry about the judgment of that petit-bourgeois fascist’ (that is, Adolf Hitler): she is on the brink of ‘a new definition of man (sic!) as an acting creature. And one that was neither empty of content, as in Sartre’s latest work, nor bound to remain absurd, as in Camus’s writing.’
Simone Weil, 34, is in London, desperately ill and in pain, but lobbying for the creation of ‘a special unit of French nurses at the front who would be deployed only in the most dangerous places, to provide first aid in the middle of battle’. She would head this unit personally, in what looks awfully like a plan to commit suicide by altruism. De Gaulle dismisses the proposal out of hand: ‘She is mad!’ Instead she writes urgently and copiously, including ‘a 300-page redesign of the cultural existence of humanity in the modern age’ before collapsing in exhaustion.
After ten years as a freelance writer in New York City, Ayn Rand, 37, sees the publication of her 700-page novel, The Fountainhead, and launches her passionate espousal of independence, her worldview that saw altruism as the great destructive force.
Hannah Arendt, 36, also in New York, has been driven out of Hitler’s Germany, and is now finding in herself the courage to face the reality of the industrialised murder of millions of Jews. What mattered was ‘to be entirely present’, or, as paraphrased by Eilenberger, ‘to philosophise’.
In the following chapters, Eilenberger tells us the story of the life and work of each of these four women over the preceding decade. It’s left to the reader to discern any unifying theme or concern. In my reading, the closest he comes to articulating a central theme is on page 69:
The philosophising person seems to be essentially a pariah of deviant insights, the prophet of a life lived rightly, whose traces can be found and deciphered even in the deepest falsity. At least this is one way to understand the role that Ayn Rand as well as her contemporaries Weil, Arendt and Beauvoir assumed with ever greater confidence. Not that they had expressly made a choice. They simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been. And deep inside they remained certain of who or what the problem needing treatment was: not themselves, but the Others. Possibly, in fact – all the Others.
If one were to pursue that view, the actual impulse of astonishment at the beginning of all philosophising is not the surprise that there is ‘something and not nothing’, but rather, honest bafflement that other people live as they do.
If I understand this correctly, part of what he is saying is that whereas their male colleagues were interested in the individual human being in relation to the world, these four women were interested in human beings in relationship to each other.
It may be that what you find in any book depends on what you bring to it. A reader well-versed in 20th century philosophy would read this one differently from me: it seems that each of these women was pushed to the margins of political and philosophical thinking, and this book is part of a movement to rectify that. But I’m not that well-versed reader. I haven’t read a whole work by any of them, but I’ve known about all four in a general way.
In my mental landscape, Simone Weil is a weirdly saintly figure who embraced suffering (and loved one of my own favourite poems, as I blogged recently), a Jew who was lived her own intense version of non-Church Christianity; Ayn Rand is a demonic figure who celebrated and justified libertarian capitalism; Simone de Beauvoir is Jean-Paul Sartre’s devoted lover who wrote The Second Sex, a key text of second-wave feminism; and Hannah Arendt is a woman of extraordinary integrity who coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and wrote about totalitarianism.
This book leaves those thumbnail sketches pretty much in place, but I now have a much richer understanding of the people and their works. I didn’t know, for instance, that Simone Weil had worked as a trade union organiser and had brilliant political insights, that Simone de Beauvoir had such a complex set of intimate relationships, that Ayn Rand was married and counted on her husband Frank O’Connor while she wrote fiercely about independence (and that ‘Ayn’ rhymes with ‘fine’), or that Hannah Arendt was quite so marvellous a human being as she appears in these pages.
Their stories are told independently, but Eilenberger makes occasional telling comparisons, and sometimes the women’s paths cross. I love the meeting between the two Simones on page 55, quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter:
I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped. Our relations ended right there.
And on page 190, the moment that has stayed with me as a piece of wisdom to live by – far from the self-abnegation of Simone Weil or the grand existentialist abstraction of de Beauvoir. Hannah Arendt, Eilenberger writes, is ‘laying the foundation of her own ethics of true self-determination in the face of the Other’:
Gratitude, for the existence of other people in the world, and active concern, for their always given vulnerability, are for Arendt the two true sources of our moral life. And it is no coincidence … that these two predispositions are the very ones that are essentially alien to Ayn Rand’s superhuman ideal figure, Howard Roark.
Amid all the egotism, altruism, self-sacrifice, angst, ambition, bitterness, sweetness, ruthlessness, pain, of those brilliant young adult lives, the notion that gratitude and concern are central went straight to my heart.
After the meeting: Usually, we spend quite a bit of time chatting before turning to the book of the night, but this time we were into it before we even sat down. The food was, as always, excellent. Our host had done a huge tray of roast vegetables and the contributions of the other five of us, with minimal advance coordination, worked well. He Who Usually Brings Dessert was on the other side of the continent, but it was someone’s birthday, and we had cake.
Though the book took us well outside our collective comfort zone, I think we were all glad to have read it. Most enjoyed it for the history, and tended to skip the philosophy. One of us is doing a philosophy course with the University of the Third Age, and had read Wolfram Eilenberger’s previous book, Time of the Magicians, about four male 20th century philosophers. He gave a couple of mini-lectures that cast light, gratefully received, on some of our dark places.
We had three different readings of ‘the Salvation of philosophy’ in the subtitle: these four women were saved by philosophy in times of extreme hardship; they saved philosophy from the dried-up mainstream by focusing on the connections among people; in the terrible time of the Second World War and Nazi atrocities, they kept the flame of philosophical thinking alive. Maybe all three are correct. (I’ve just seen the subtitle of the original is Die Rettung der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten (1933-1943), literally The Salvation of Philosophy in Dark Times (1933–1943). And the title itself is Feuer der Freiheit – Fire of Freedom. It’s kind of intriguing that the four woman aren’t named, and there’s not even a hint that the book focuses on particular women. I wonder how much that change of packaging influences out reading.)
A couple of guys took against Simone de Beauvoir. I tried to defend her, and was supported by someone drawing a comparison between her and one of the participants in Australian Survivor that was as obscure to me as the extracts from Simone Weil’s journals. Incidentally, I now know how to pronounce Weil (it’s VAY).
We were in awe at how young the four women were in the years covered by the book. Some were pretty sure that Simone de Beauvoir’s entanglement with a student would get her fired and publicly shamed these days. It was a revelation that for de Beauvoir the war at times barely disturbed her way of life (someone had been to see the Anne Dangar exhibition in Canberra and had a similar revelation – ‘Oh yes, Hitler’s doing all that stuff,’ the artists in France said to each other, ‘but cubism is so interesting.’) It was pointed out that two of the four women were novelists rather than philosophers as such. Someone thought Hannah Arendt was a bit dull (I was shocked). Some were surprised to find themselves feeling sympathy for Ayn Rand (I was ashamed).
We barely talked about Donald Trump. I hope he noticed the lack of attention.
You don’t go to Jennifer Maiden’s poetry for a comfort read. For almost a decade now she has announced the title and theme of a forthcoming book early each year, and uploaded sample poems as they were written over the following months, generally relating to violence, political hypocrisy, and villainy from the headlines. The book has appeared, as promised, early the next January. It’s as if a fragmentary epic poem of our times is unfolding in real time.
WW III: New Poems is the latest instalment. As the title suggests, violent conflict, especially in the Ukraine and Gaza, features prominently, behind it the looming threat of global war. For a proper review, I recommend Geoff Page in the ABRat this link. This blog post isn’t so much a review as a disjointed reflection on just page 47*.
Before going there, a personal note. My blog post about Maiden’s previous book – The China Shelf: New Poems (Quemar Press 2024) – focused on the poem, ‘It’s an odd thing, pity’, and included this:
Not everyone will grasp how US imperialism can be seen as ‘falling’. If anything, some would say it’s on the verge of exploding and bringing the rest of us down with it, terrifying rather than poignant.
The title poem of WW III includes this:
Reviewing The China Shelf, a kind critic worried that my reference to the falling Empire could lessen the idea that it wasn't just falling but exploding, and possibly dragging its allies hellward with it, but he was only considering one poem and of course the book and others before it always took often a stance of sharper warning
I may have got it wrong, but at least I’m kind, and as a humble blogger I’m flattered to be called a critic.
Page 47 of WW III is the first 19 lines of ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer woke up in the Australian Ambassador’s residence in Washington’.
This page sets the scene for a much longer poem. The ‘serious conversation’, foreshadowed in the second-last line, could be summarised as, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells Kevin Rudd that it’s not wise to set Australia up to be the US’s proxy in a future war with China.’ The poem could be summarised abstractly: ‘With Dietrich Bonhoeffer as mouthpiece, Jennifer Maiden repeats her warning that the USA is not to be trusted as an ally to Australia.’ Luckily, as with any poem worth its salt, that summary tells you almost nothing and is pretty misleading. You can buy the book to read the whole poem, or you can hear Jennifer Maiden performing it at this link.
The poem belongs to Maiden’s personal tradition of poems where a famous person, historical or fictional, ‘wakes up’ to interact with a living person. In 2009 her fictional character George Jeffreys woke up in a number of global hotspots to see George W Bush on television. Kevin Rudd is one of a number of Australian politicians who have figured since then in delicious conversations: Tony Abbott with Queen Victoria, Julia Gillard with Aneurin Bevan, Malcolm Turnbull with Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote, Tanya Plibersek with Jane Austen. (Beyond these shores, pairings have included Mother Teresa and Diana Spencer, Gore Vidal and Julian Assange, Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.) Usually the pairings are based on something the politician has said or written. In Kevin Rudd’s 2006 essay, ‘Faith in Politics’, published in The Monthly (link here, if you want to refresh your memory), he named Bonhoeffer as an inspiration. The pair made their maiden Maiden appearance in Drones and Phantoms (2014).
It’s interesting to notice just how much information is either given or assumed in these lines. It wouldn’t be a crime to read without googling. As Magdalena Ball said in her review of The China Shelf (link here), ‘You don’t have to have the kind of encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian history and command of current affairs that Jennifer Maiden does to read her books.’ But it helps, and there’s always the invitation to learn more.
First, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’ve vaguely heard of him as a pastor who spoke out against the Nazis and was murdered by them. So I know he brings a kind of moral integrity to the conversation. The poem give me a little more:
Dietrich had been in New York in the 1930s at a seminary, where
he had already witnessed the intolerance of one Empire, before
he returned home to the murders of another.
I might not have gone googling if I wasn’t blogging about the poem, but I did, and found that while studying theology in New York in 1930, Bonhoeffer engaged with African-American churches, and became strongly anti-racist. I don’t know that he used the term ‘empire’ about either the USA or Nazi Germany, but it wouldn’t be a poem without that kind of editorialising.
Second, Kevin Rudd. You’d probably know that he was the Australian Ambassador to the USA, but for those who know him there’s a deft evocation of his persona: ‘profound, bouncy, possibly tragic’. (Further on in the conversation, Kevin asks a question ‘and answered himself, as was his custom’.)
Third, the setting. Here’s a pic from the building’s facebook page – ‘the prettiest of places’. Who knew it was associated with the notoriously belligerent US general George Patton? (For readers of my generation no explanation needed: George C Scott in the movie Patton leaps to mind.) According to my googling, Patton rented the house rather than built it, but the association is still there.
DJ Kity Glitter with Rudd. Photo from Sydney Morning Herald 5 June 2023
Fourth, the headlines. Kevin Rudd did host a party featuring drag queens at the ambassador’s residence in June 2023. As far as I can tell, the tennis party was a different occasion, but who’s to say there wasn’t tennis at the Pride party as well? The fabulous image of drag queens playing tennis is an example of a news items seized on for poetic purposes, in this case with what looks like glee.
Given recent events in the USA, the mention of drag queens suggests that the poem will be about culture wars. But it’s actually a piece of misdirection. Over the page, the poem’s real subject is revealed, when Kevin asks:
____________________________________ But I suppose really you are here about the police force?
And the poem’s key news item is identified: a hot-mic moment in August 2024 in which a US official, talking to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese,
_________________________ named Rudd as the schemer who dissuaded America from proposing their own police force in the Pacific in favour of one organised and paid for by Australia.
All this information, of course, doesn’t lie inert on the page, but is woven into engaging poetry. For instance, one of Maiden’s themes is the way the US, behind its benign façade, is a ruthless military power. The residence, with its link to Patton, could have been built to her specifications. The prettiness and cosiness of the residence is haunted by bold military maneuvers (note the US spelling), yet the sensuous reality is also there:
still for a moment and for a moment doubtful. They were in soft chairs plump enough for a cottage or a sitcom, in a room too large not to let time enter, but intimate enough for their serious conversation.
We are given enough of Kevin and Dietrich’s histories and personal quirks for them to be more than simply avatars for positions or points of view (like, say, the characters in Plato’s dialogues). On the other hand, neither on the page nor when performing the poem, does Maiden make any attempt to give them different voices. (Maiden-Trump has none of real-life-Trump’s incoherence.) They are not fully-rounded dramatic characters (it’s not a sitcom) but they have enough independent reality that you feel the poet herself is curious to hear what they have to say in their ‘serious conversation’. I think that’s why this long run of imaginary conversations doesn’t feel tired or repetitive – they are still part of a process of discovery. (There’s an underlying question that this poem goes on to address: What are we to make of Kevin Rudd’s current incarnation as Ambassador? What’s happened to his irritability, his love of China, his social awkwardness, any bitterness about being ousted by Julia Gillard? It doesn’t address Trump’s hostility to him … that would be a different poem.)
It’s easy to be caught up in Maiden’s subject matter. Her poems can be contentious – over the page, Kevin says, as if it’s plain fact, ‘the Americans replaced me with Gillard’, and even on this page there may be an implied equivalence between Nazi Germany and 1930s USA. (If ever there was a poet who didn’t expect her readers to agree with her sentiments a hundred percent, it is Jennifer Maiden.) But this is poetry, and what is said isn’t necessarily more important than the way it is said.
Weaving isn’t a bad metaphor for how these lines progress. The reader’s attention moves back and forth like the shuttle on a loom: the residence with and without snow, General Patton then and now, corners and mirrors, military manoeuvres and drag queens, Kevin’s contrasting qualities, a room large but intimate, the shift from drag queens to the Pacific police force. Maybe it’s not so much a shuttle as a tennis ball. ‘Click. Clock.’
The way the poem sounds is interesting. Some of Maiden’s poems have sustained rhymes that you barely notice on first reading. That’s not so in this one, but especially in the opening lines there’s a lot of alliteration, especially of sibilants (‘prettiest of places’, ‘still manifested, / like ghosts in corners’, ‘every possible strategy and some that should not’). The long lines often break in mid sentence, even mid phrase (‘his friend / Kevin’, ‘should not / really have been’, ‘where / he had already witnessed’, ‘before / he returned’, ‘they were in / soft chairs’, ‘their / serious conversation’). To my ear, these result in a kind of clutter, a feature rather than a bug, that adds an odd urgency to the voice, an urgency that’s all too fitting in poems that predict war.
Since WW III: New Poems was published, Dietrich and Kevin have had a further conversation in the Residence. Click on this link to the Quemar Press website and search for “Rare Earths”.
I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78. As WW III: New Poems only has 76 pages, I’m reverting to the year of my birth, ’47.
Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland Nº 255 (Winter 2024) (Links are to the online versions unless otherwise indicated.)
I sometime approach literary journals as if shouldering a grim obligation – doing my bit in the cultural ecology. (Added later: The morning after I uploaded this post, I read in a letter from Esther Anatolitis, editor of Meanjin, that my subscription ‘supports the ecosystem of Australian writing: that fragile yet incredibly powerful space where the finest new work is written’. Great minds draw on the same tropes.) The austere retro design of this Overland, one of four to mark a 70th anniversary, didn’t do much to dispel the grimness. Nor did the editorial, which underlines the darkness of our times. But then …
The first thirty pages or so are taken up with ‘Writing from the South: an interview with Kim Scott’. It’s leisurely, full of unfinished sentences and swirling crosscurrents of thought and information – there’s no apparent attempt to tidy up the spoken conversation, and as a result you (or at least I) get to feel you’re in the room with the the living, breathing, thinking author of, among other things, That Deadman Dance, Taboo (links to my blog posts) and (what I haven’t read but now really want to) Benang. He’s in conversation with Samuel J. Cox.
I’ll mention two other non-fiction pieces: ‘The Australian media’s problem with Palestine’ by Juliet Fox, which tells about decades of government suppression of Palestinian voices on a Melbourne community radio station; and ‘“Arts funding is fucked”: Overland 1973–1975’, a plus-ça-change piece by Overland‘s digital archivist Sam Ryan about the politics of funding to the arts in Australia 50-odd years ago.
As always, there’s poetry, ranging in this issue from probably-very-good-if-you’re-motivated-to-spend-a-lot-of-time-with-it-but-today-I’m-not to a beautifully executed punch to the guts. The latter is ‘The Killer in Me’ by Ann-Marie Blanchard, in which the speaker personifies her uterus after a miscarriage. Somewhere between the two extremes is the dauntingly titled ‘Poem in asymmetric transparency’ by Shari Kocher, a meditation on a Margaret Preston painting:
Three lotus lookalikes floating in solar darkness.
As it happens, page 78* occurs in the piece of fiction that speaks most to me, Jordan Smith’s ‘Something Is Rotten’, in which a technological solution to the climate emergency goes terribly wrong, seen from the point of view of young lawyers who thought their normal work was high-pressure. At page 78, the catastrophe is beginning to unfold, though the characters stay with their usual preoccupations. Paul, one of the barristers, looks out of his high-rise window at the ‘sat-drones’ doing hi-tech stuff to the upper atmosphere:
‘Fuck knows what they’re doing but it does look good.’ The sat-drones twinkled as, one by one, they flew up then plunged down, like waves running up and down a skipping rope. The colour of each oscillated between a crystal blue and a sharp, metallic crimson. Rob felt a bit dizzy. He and Sarine looked at each other.
As required by a tight deadline, Rob puts the dizziness aside, takes ‘a few painkillers’ and gets back to work.
His phone buzzed incessantly.
Sydney 6G Friday, 6 June 11:43 Notification centre News alert: PM urges calm after atmospheric pressure dr… (10+)
Rob cleared notifications and switched on do not disturb.
The reader feel the disaster happening while the character sticks to the his mundane urgencies. It’s deft storytelling. Like the poems I’ve mentioned it’s marked as ‘Online soon’ on the Overland website, and may be available by the time you read this.
I don’t usually google authors, but I did look up Jordan Smith. He’s a barrister who has an Honours degree in nuclear physics, so I guess he knows what he’s taking about on both sides of the equation.
I haven’t exactly dispelled the notion of grimness I invoked in my first sentence – colonisation, genocide, miscarriage, climate catastrophe aren’t cheery subjects. But taken along with the evocative decorations from past issues (Richard Tipping in the 1970s, Rod Shaw and John Copeland in the 1990s) there’s something exhilarating about the way Overland has survived so much change in the world and in itself, still giving a platform to new voices, still saying things that aren’t easy to hear elsewhere.
I wrote this blog post on the land of the Wangal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and lived through extraordinary changes in the land and climate over that time.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This is first time I’ve looked at page 78.
I’ve been suspicious of the notion that a poem is always a collaboration between poet and reader (or readers) – that each reader, even each reading, creates a different poem. My suspicion has been softened, but not completely dispelled, by taking part in the fabulous online Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course (‘Modpo’).
But I’ve realised that one of my favourite poems, ‘Love III’ by 17th Century English poet George Herbert, is a brilliant example of how that notion can hold up.
Here’s the poem:
Love (III)
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.
If you’re interested, there’s a beautiful, scholarly account of the poem by Hannah Brooks-Motl at this link. What follows is not particularly scholarly. If you make it to the end you may even find it amusing.
I’m currently reading Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries, translated by Shaun Whiteside, a fascinating look at a decade in the parallel lives of four brilliant women – Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil. The book reminded me that Herbert’s poem played a major role in the life of Simone Weil.
In 1938, Weil was suffering extreme pain. She had lost her teaching job, and doctors couldn’t find a diagnosis or offer any respite. She found relief mainly in listening to sacred music, when, to quote Eilenberger, ‘the pain receded into the background and even allowed her to feel, in her deep devotion, removed from the realm of the physically restricted here and now.’ As well as the music, she turned to poetry. ‘Love (III)’ was important to her. In her Spiritual Autobiography, quoted by Hanna Brooks-Motl, she wrote:
Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that ... Christ himself came down and took possession of me.
It was a turning point in her life, and a wonderful example of how to read a poem. George Herbert would have been thrilled.
My reading was a little different.
I was 23 year old English Honours student at Sydney University in 1970. At the end of the previous year I had left a Catholic religious order where I had been ‘in formation’ for seven years, and at the time I’m talking of I was in my first intimate sexual relationship.
In my youthful enthusiasm, emerging from a world dominated by concepts like the love of Christ into one where I was experiencing the joys of sex and human connection as a different kind of sacred, I loved this poem for the way it eroticises the love of God.
No one else seems to have noticed that it can be read as a sexual encounter. (And I did my BA Honours thesis on Herbert, so I read a lot of critics.) It’s hard to spell out what I mean without seeming to snigger, but I don’t, and didn’t, feel at all sniggery. Love (the beloved), observes me ‘grow slack / When I first entered in’, and asks what the problem is. ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ says the speaker of the poem. There’s a bit of back and forth, reassurance from the beloved and so on, and then she (because, heterosexual me, I was quite capable of letting ‘Lord’ be feminine) says, ‘You must sit down … and taste my meat.’ And the last line fills me with joy every time.
The poem spoke to me powerfully, and kindly, and with great tenderness about (to use cold 21st century words) performance anxiety, erectile dysfunction and alternatives to penetrative sex.
I don’t know what Simone Weil, or George Herbert for that matter, would think of that, but well, it’s my poem now.
The main character and narrator of Brotherless Night, Sashi to her friends, is a young Tamil woman who is studying to become a doctor in the city of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. She lives through the beginnings of the civil war in the 1980s. Her beloved eldest brother is killed in the anti-Tamil riots of 1983 – the riots that are made so vividly present in S. Shakthidharan’s play Counting and Cracking. Two more brothers join the Tamil Tigers (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), and K, a man she has loved since childhood, becomes a celebrated hero and martyr among the Tigers.
Sashi herself is caught between an oppressive government army and a ‘liberation’ force that ruthlessly kills many of the people they claim to be defending. Sashi deplores the tactics of the Tigers, but she works for them in a secret clinic, patching up wounded cadres and civilian casualties, and she can never renounce her love for her brothers and K.
In a pivotal sequence, K comes out of hiding to ask Sashi for her support in a dangerous undertaking: to do so will align her publicly with ‘the movement’, which would grievously misrepresent her sympathies, but not to do it would be to betray a childhood friend. I think of E. M. Forster’s much quoted line: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ But Sashi’s choice is not as simple as that.
As she ponders the dilemma, there’s this line (on page 238):
Before there was a movement there were six children on a lane.
It is her loyalty to the vision of themselves as children that is at the heart of the book – that is, her loyalty to a basic shared humanity, and to telling the truth from that place.
It’s a terrific story. I was invested in the characters and sorry to put the book down. Part of its strength is the way it reaches out from its fictional world to highlight elements of actual reality. I can think of three ways.
First, other texts are referred to and integrated into the narrative. The books that Sashi and her brothers read might make an interesting reading list, but most strikingly Sashi and her Anatomy professor start a book group for woman at the university, and at their first meeting they discuss Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, a real book by Sri Lankan author Kumari Jayawardena. In lesser hands this might have felt like analysis being shoehorned into the narrative, but we share the young women’s intellectual excitement, and their sense of peril as no one can be sure things won’t be reported back to the Tigers, with potentially dire consequences.
Second, there are elements of roman à clef. The salient features of K’s life and especially death, for instance, align closely with those of Tiger leader Theelipan.(Don’t look up this link if you want to avoid spoilers.) One of the book’s epigraphs – ‘There is no life for me apart from my people.’ – signals another real-life equivalent. It’s from Rajani Thiranagama (Wikipedia page here), a human rights activist who was once a member of the Tigers but became critical of them and was eventually believed to be murdered by them. She is the model for Sashi’s Anatomy professor, and the last third of the book features a fictional version of her real-life project of gathering evidence of atrocities committed by Tigers, Indians and Sri Lankan military.
The third way may be peculiar to me.
A young woman has been viciously assaulted by an Indian soldier – nominally there as part of a peace-keeping force. Sashi treats her injuries, and she returns later in a different, devastatingly vengeful role. This young woman’s name, Priya, rang a bell for me, and for no reason I could pinpoint I felt a particular investment in her story. Then I remembered the source of the bell: Priya Nadesalingam, the subject of a huge amount of press in Australia in 2023 (here’s one link in case you need reminding). That Priya, who had sought asylum in Australia with her husband Nades Murugappan and their two daughters, had become part of the community in the tiny Queensland town of Biloela. After a dawn raid, they came close to being deported and sent back to Sri Lanka. There was a huge public outcry and, long story short, the family are now living in Biloela on permanent visas.
The two Priyas have very different stories, but the coincidence of names brings home to me with tremendous force the horrific broader reality behind the bloodless statements about refugees made by politicians in Australia (and I assume elsewhere in the West).
The book doesn’t preach or lecture, but it brings a deeper understanding, not only of the struggle for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka, but of resistance movements generally. It makes me want to be a better person living in a kinder country with broader horizons.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia, as well as the generosity I have personally experienced from First Nations people all my life.
Esther Anatolitis (ediitor), Meanjin Vol 83 Nº 3 (Spring 2024) (links are to the Meanjin website: some but not all of them are available to non-subscribers)
This Meanjin was published before King Charles visited Australia last year. This means Jenny Hocking’s blistering essay, ‘Remnants of Empire: Racism, Power and Royal Privilege‘, appeared well before Lidia Thorpe’s headline-grabbing outburst. The article, which amply fulfils the promise of its title, made me feel much more sympathy for the outburst.
There’s a lot else in this issue to delight and enlighten. Some pieces that I think of as necessary. Apart from Jenny Hocking’s, three that stand out are:
‘Well, It’s Beautiful Country, Really –‘ by Mike Ross. Each issue of Meanjin these days begins with a ‘Meanjin Paper’ – an essay by a First Nations person. In this one Mike Ross, an Olkola man who has been at the vanguard of land rights for the people of Cape York for three decades, talks about finding meaning in Country, about constantly learning
‘Lucky for Some‘ by Frank Bongiorno on the 60th anniversary of publication of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country, which I read in tandem with Nick Bryant’s recent piece on the same subject in the Guardian
‘Jews, Antisemitism and Power in Australia‘ by Max Kaiser, which parses the way accusations of antisemitism have been used to silence important points of view. This article may have been published six months ago, but it feels hyper-relevant today as actual vicious antisemitism and and dubious accusations of antisemitism are ramping up.
There are pirces that may not be necessary, but they’re fun and educative all the same:
an interview with poet Ellen van Neerven (which I enjoyed even though it focuses on a book of theirs I haven’t read)
a scathing annotation of the Australian Constitution from First Nations writer Claire G. Coleman
There is some excellent fiction, including these two:
‘The Feeling Bones‘ by Lucy Nelson, which tells a family’s story in terms of their bone ailments; and incidentally informs me that ‘sits bones’, a term for the backside I had only heard used by my Pilates instructor, actually comes from the world of dance.
‘The Other Doctor‘, in which James Salvius Cheng finds a way to talk about the exhausting business of being a medical practitioner without coming across as a whinger.
A trio of memoirs call out to each other about disability, religion and sexuality:
Love Is Worship by Adrian Mouhajer, about finding peace in a Muslim family as a queer person
Crocodile by Ella Ferris, brilliant, complex piece of writing which includes experiences of Aboriginality and disability
There are some excellent poems. The ones I warm to most (not necessarily the ‘best’) are:
‘Mothertongues’ by Grace Chan, which begins ‘My son is starting to speak / in English’ and later, as she tries to teach him some Chinese, ‘our tongues stumble / in synchrony’
‘The Women’s Shelter’, a rhyming sonnet by Claire Watson, in which a woman creates a knotted rag rug from strips of old bedsheets
There are things that aren’t my cup of tea: a smart-alecky essay on satire, an incomprehensible poem, some ‘experiments’, a review or two that convinced me not to read the books under consideration. But I can imagine each of those finding readers who will delight in them
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia, as once agin the sun is rising later in the mornings, and spiders are making their presence known in the bushes.
A Lesbian friend of mine was surprised, even shocked, when I told her I hadn’t read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I got the impression that she revised her opinion of my literacy on the spot.
Well, now I’ve read it and can hold my head high again.
Alison Bechdel is probably best known for the Bechdel test, which serves as a rough guide to a movie’s level of misogyny or otherwise: does it have more than one named female character? do they have a conversation about something other than a man? According to Wikipedia, Bechdel modestly attributes the invention of the test to a friend and ultimately to Virginia Woolf. But it still bears her name.
She is also celebrated as a creator of comics, in particular her long-running series Dykes to Watch Out for. The strip ran for 25 years, from 1983 to 2008, with a brief revival on Trump’s first election. Fun Home, published in 2006, brought her a wider readership. The book was a New York Times bestseller. It has been adapted into an audio-book and an award-winning stage musical, with a movie reportedly on the way. It has been included on college reading lists and Wikipedia currently lists eight attempts at having it banned in the USA. When I bought my copy the shop assistant enthused that she had studied it at university, but then read it again later for pleasure.
It’s a memoir. At first, it seems like a familiar tale of living with a tyrannical father who is emotionally distant and given to violent rages. But it develops into something much more complex and interesting. Towards the end of the first chapter, Alison and her brother are at Sunday Mass with their parents, and a caption reads: ‘He appeared to be an ideal husband and father.’ This is an ordinary observation about middle class families putting on a front for public display, but then there’s a second caption: ‘But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys?’ And that question hangs there unexplained for many pages, as the narrative takes us back to the family’s early life, the father’s part-time work as a mortician (which is where the book’s title comes from – it was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the undertaker’s business), and Alison’s own portrait of the artist as a young woman.
So the narrative moves back and forth, entwining the narrator’s own story as a nerdy young person with OCD who comes out as a Lesbian, with the unfolding story of her father’s sexuality, and the way it all plays out in the family. Key moments are hinted at, passed over as offstage events, and then revisited in detail much later, so that there’s a constant sense of something not yet revealed.
It’s a bookish family, and a bookish book, shot though with literary references. The story of Daedalus and Icarus forms a major thread, beginning with a father-and-daughter game of ‘airplane’ as seen on the cover – ‘In the circus acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called ‘Icarian games’.– and leading in the final pages to a revisionist interpretation of the myth, applied to this story. Camus gets a look-in, and so do Proust, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, J. D. Salinger, A Chorus Line, Henry James, Shakespeare of course, and more – none of them incidental to the plot.
Page 77* may give you an idea of the art and the narrative style. Alison is nineteen, at college, and has just realised she is a Lesbian. The realisation has come about ‘in a manner consistent with [her] bookish upbringing. A revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind.’ There are a couple of pages that could be used as a reading list for a young person making a similar realisation; she attends a meeting of a Gay Union ‘in petrified silence’, and in the resulting exhilaration decides to come out to her parents:
If you enlarge this image you see how beautifully words and images are integrated. The captions offer a commentary on the action: ‘We were that sort of family,’ ‘He seemed strangely pleased,’ ‘I was devastated’. The page is a good example of Bechdel’s skill with dialogue: the father’s words on the phone convey his awkwardness quite independently of the caption’s commentary. The images are more than illustration – the technical term for this kind of story telling is ‘sequential art’, a different beast from ‘illustrated story’. We see how 19-year-old Alison lives: her clothes, the music she listens to, that she has to go to a post office box to receive mail, that her coming-out letter is typed, and composed with the assistance of a thesaurus. As often in this book, the images themselves include text: not just the names of books and records, but a glimpse of the mother’s letter, implying a documentary dimension to the narrative.
On the next page, there’s a fine example of the way the story is given to us bit by bit, layer by layer. We see Alison’s diary entry about her mother’s letter, which quotes part of the letter we are not shown here, hinting at the revelations yet to come about the father’s sexuality.
Like Art Spigelman’s Maus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, this is a comic that people who don’t read comics would do well to spend a little time with. It might not make comic-readers out of them, but it may give them the same kind of pleasure as a good movie or novel.
I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where a flock of corellas, which I think are visiting from inland country, have been making a lot of noise. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to any First Nations readers of this blog.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 77.
Before the meeting: About five decades ago I had to write an Eng Lit essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins’s sonnet ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’. It’s a poem that cries out to be read aloud, and on a weekend away at a beach house with friends, I found an out-of-the-way spot where I could perform the poem over and over for my own ears. It turned out that my secluded corner was actually an amplifying booth, and my sonorous renditions were heard by everyone in the house. Someone finally came and pleaded with me to stop. Embarrassment aside, I still love the poem.
So I took it as a personal gift to me when the poem is being recited, unannounced and unexplained, at the start of Chapter 15 of Our Evenings:
‘Earnest,’ I said, ‘earthless … equal … attuneable …’ Stella peered at me, tongue on lip, daring me. ‘… vaulty …’ she said. … vaulty, voluminous … stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vast –’ (now we chanted it together) ‘womb-of-all – home-of-all – hearse-of-all NIGHT!’ ‘I bet you can’t go on.’
If I hadn’t been loving the book before then, I would have been hooked.
As it happens, I was enjoying the book. The hero-narrator David Win, son of an English mother and a Burmese father he has never known, was given a scholarship to attend a prestigious boarding school, and at the start of Chapter 15 he’s studying at Oxford. The novel traces his development into a successful actor, his crushes, affairs and finally marriage with men, and his arrival at a reasonably contented late middle age (as we in our late 70s refer to the 60s).
The phrase that gives the novel its title occurs when David is in his last year at the boarding school. He is taken under the wing of Mr Hudson, his English teacher. They listen to classical music together late in the evening. These quiet times have an intimate, erotic charge, but though other boys leap to crude conclusions, ‘nothing ever “happened”, as they say’. Among the pieces they listen to is the first movement of Janáček’s ‘On an Overgrown Path’, which has its own title, ‘Our Evenings’. (You can hear it played by Rudolf Firkusny in 1986 at this link.)
The piece seemed simple and songlike, but the modulations in it made you wonder, and an agitated figure broke in higher up and then, like the scratch on the record, disappeared and left you with the song in a further change of mood, which didn’t quite replace the first one but seemed to cast the shadow of experience over it – what, I couldn’t say, but I felt it. I had no idea what we were listening to or how long it was going on – there was a very quiet passage when the agitated figure came back, but subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty, and soon after that the piece ended without any fuss. I glanced at Mr Hudson, but he was staring at the fire too, and then he jumped up and said, ‘Shall we hear it again?’
Apart from being an instance of the way other works – plays, poems, pieces of music – move the narrative along, this passage is a nice example of the way David as narrator shows rather than tells. ‘I couldn’t say, but I felt it.’ He never says in so many words that he has a crush on Mr Hudson, or that he believes it to be reciprocated, but in little moments like this – in Mr Hudson jumping up and suggesting a replay – readers can draw their own conclusions.
The description of Janáček’s music could be applied to the novel itself: ‘subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty’ occasionally interrupted by an ‘agitated figure’. The prose is elegant and unruffled, and most of the terrible things that happen – AIDS, Brexit, Covid – are offstage. David as boy, adolescent and man is unfailingly polite and helpful – we are usually left to imagine what feelings he is covering up, even perhaps from himself. He regularly encounters ‘agitated figures’ in the form of racism, but mostly it’s of the raised eyebrow or muttered phrase, micro-aggressive variety. An African-heritage lover says, ‘You’re not even Black!’ Likewise the homophobia he encounters is subtle – when he comes out to his mother and her female friend, their response is more or less, ‘Well, that’s been obvious for a long time!’ Class plays a role – David’s patrons, whom he loves to the end – are like Proust’s aristocrats in their unfailing graciousness and generosity, and the sense that nothing really touches them. The mystery of his father remains a mystery, though late in life he receives some vague information. As in real life, many mysteries remain mysterious.
I suppose sex itself might count as an ‘agitated figure’. There’s quite a lot of it but, though it’s not coy, very little is explicit. I remember only two moments when sexual body parts are named, one involving a kind rejection, the other the beginning of a solid relationship. Neither is the slightest bit prurient.
The last 10 pages depart from the mainly ‘subdued and dreamlike’ narrative in a way that came as a surprise to me, and casts a brilliant light back over the preceding pages.
After the meeting: At the Book Club, we usually have two books under discussion at each meeting. This time, there was just the one, but everyone had to report on the book they’d scored in our Kris Kringle at last meeting. So our discussion, which followed and preceded convivial conversation about other things, began with enticing rundowns of books by Bernhard Schlink, Jock Serong, Robbie Arnott and Niamh Mulvey, and an unenticing rundown of one other.
Of Our Evenings, we had a very interesting discussion. I probably liked the book most, but no one hated it. The only strong difference was about the last ten pages, which I felt gave shape and significance to the whole thing and most others experienced as a lame and unnecessary framing device. It would be too spoilerish to present the arguments here. I’ll just state the obvious: they’re entitled to their opinions, but they’re wrong.
One person had an interesting take on the title. It captured the way the book, for her, is like a series of conversations you might have in a quiet evening at home: meandering, pleasant, amiable recollections and reflections, without drama or much significance. (If that’s so, I hope I said at the time, there’s always an awareness of terrible things happening in the outside world, of which many of the tiny things that come up in those conversations are micro-effects.)
David Win as narrator and hero provoked interesting conversation, which I’ll try to summarise. He is an outsider because of racism, class and sexuality, not necessarily in that order. As an outsider, his main way of being in the world is to aim to fill other people’s expectations – to act out the scripts he is given. It’s not insignificant that he’s an actor. He rarely takes the initiative, and there’s a way he doesn’t seem to know who he is. Not just as narrator, but also as character, he doesn’t have access to his own inner life. The narrative restraint about sex, which is not so in Hollinghurst’s other books that people had read, may be part of this. I read out the only passage in the book that mentions hard-ons, and people laughed (but not at all derisively). It’s as if in this book explicit sex is a relief from always having to decode what is being communicated in tight-lipped upper-class British dialogue (see Mr Hudson’s ‘Shall we hear it again?’ above).
We discussed other characters that I didn’t mention in the first part of this blog, especially a Boris Johnsonesque blustering bully, .
Less centrally, some took an almost anthropological interest in the portrayal of Gay male relationships – and it’s true that Hollinghurst gives meticulous detail on how people make their desires known. One person felt that (minor spoiler alert) having the David’s mother become a Lesbian was just laying on the Gayness too thick. Another, on the contrary, was impressed and delighted by the nuanced portrayal of middle-class, middle-aged, post-heterosexual-marriage Lesbianism.
We didn’t discuss the Hopkins poem, the Janáček music, or the plays – notably by Racine and Ben Jonson – that turn up in the narration.
Mint-flavoured Turkish delight was on offer. Only two of us tried it. I was the only one to finish my piece. I don’t recommend it. I do recommend the book.
Our Book Club met on unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present. I hope that our conversation was in some way in continuity with yarns that have been happening on this land for tens of thousands of years.
Me fail? I fly! 