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Recent Reading

- Once again I have failed to keep a record of my thoughts soon after reading each book, so here I am, almost a year later in some instances, trying to remember how these books have affected me. I am trying something new this time, listing the books in the order that I finished reading them:

Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads

Having grown up within an evangelical Christian environment, this was an uncannily-familiar story world to me. Needless to say, I couldn’t put this book down. I found Franzen’s engagement with ideas surrounding faith really compelling and refreshing, presenting complicated characters within a social milieu that could easily be flattened and made two-dimensional. I was a little miffed by the way the story seemed to sort of end abruptly - but I soon learned that this is the first book in a forthcoming trilogy. Needles to say (again), I look forward to reading Franzen’s next two books, whenever they are published.

Terry Pratchett - Witches Abroad

Read this one in preparation of teaching The Crucible, knowing members of my class would likely have read it as part of their curriculum the year beforehand. It was nice to revisit Pratchett’s work; I hadn’t guffawed aloud reading a book in some time (possibly not since I read The Light Fantastic, when I was sixteen?), but there was joke early on in this one that killed me. Overall, I thought this story was cute, though it is probably not among my top five favourites of the Discworld series. 

Tony Birch - Dark as Last Night

By the end of the first story, as I sat crying on a park bench, I knew that I would be reading all the short stories in this small collection. The compassion that Birch has for his characters is astounding, and deeply affecting.

Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

Some of the passages within this book burn on the pages with a searingly white-hot intensity of passion that I didn’t realise was possible (with the exception of some of my favourite moments from Shakespeare). What a book!

Joan Lindsay - Picnic at Hanging Rock

Taught this one for the first time, having never read it before. Three chapters of action and then a dozen-or-so chapters of miasma - the structure of this book is unlikely anything I had read. I particularly love the way that Lindsay implicates us as readers as being just as guilty of trying to impose order and narrative as the ostensible villain of the story, Mrs. Appleyard; mischief and mystery are afoot, though not necessarily in the ways one might expect. 

Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name

Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

I had only planned to read the first book of Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga, but then realised at the conclusion of My Brilliant Friend that it hadn’t really concluded (practically a cliff-hanger!) - and that the four books intended as one long narrative that would otherwise be too largely to physically bind together with paper and glue... so I kept reading, trusting that it pay off eventually. (Spoiler alert: it did!) My feelings towards the four instalments, respectively: very good; kind of slow, lots of time at the beach; can’t really remember, but considering that I kept reading, probably felt that it was cooking with gas; brilliant.

Lesley Chow - You’re History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music

bell hooks - The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Where to begin? I know people read this book, or other works from hooks, and then proselytise about it all the time... I get it! But you would sing, too, if you read this book. It is essential, life-changing reading. There are so many ideas and passages that have stuck with me, although the phrase “the everyday traumatisation of boys” is one that will linger with me for years to come as a haunting reminder of what I and many others have survived, and what I hope we can aspire to recover from - with (you guessed it) the will to change.

bell hooks - When Angles Speak of Love

After hearing the news of her death - unbelievably (or perhaps not, considering her influence and impact on culture) on the same day I was attending a book club meeting to discuss All About Love - I wanted to spend time with more of hooks’ writing.

Mariana Enriquez - The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

A student recommended this one to me - and I was shocked! And I am so grateful to have been shocked - it had been a long time since I had read something so engrossing and terrifying. I particularly loved the story Meat, which is about a charismatic popular music performer and their fans. 

Mariana Enriquez - Things We Lost in the Fire

Somehow, this collection is even more macabre and disturbing than the one above - and I think I liked it even more. These two books have rekindled my interest in reading translated literature from around the world; gratitude, again. I find myself often thinking of the stories The Dirty Kid, The Inn, and No Flesh Over Our Bones, all of which I loved.

Carmen Maria Machado - Her Body and Other Parties

Another collection of Gothic-horror short stories, also recommended to me by a student. Would I have found - or have read - these otherwise, in another version of my life? I don’t know; I am grateful for the ways in which my teaching work facilities new discoveries, thanks to students who are passionate about reading. I particularly loved The Husband Stitch and The Resident - the latter is vaguely reminiscent of The Shining. (Not that I have read The Shining, mind you; King’s work always seems undercut by such a strong current of misogyny that I haven’t known where to start with reading horror fiction previously.)

Angela Chen - Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

Another where-do-I-start? book. I wish so much that this book had been written - and that I had read it - a decade ago. I found it to be so wise and enlightening; my thinking about my own body has been transformed, as has my thinking about love, relationships, sexuality and sex in general - with the minimum about of hyperbole: this book is a gift.

Kae Tempest - Let Them Eat Chaos

Helen Garner - Stories

I started reading these stories in the bath and could not stop - most of a Saturday went by as I stood in the (eventually) empty bathroom, with the afternoon light streaming through the window, unable to move to put clothes on or go about my day. I particularly treasure My Hard Heart, Civilisation and Its Discontents, and What We Say - I find myself thinking about these stories often.

Jeanette Winterson - The Passion

Lynda Barry - One! Hundred! Demons!

I think Nick Hornby is quoted on the back cover of this book as using the word ‘soulful’ to describe this autobiographical collection of comics by Lynda Barry - and yep, that’s the word that comes to mind for me, too. There is such soulful feeling in these vignettes.

Yoko Ogawa - Revenge

I haven’t read many short story cycles before, although I am becoming increasingly interested in the form. I particularly enjoyed the eponymous story fro this collection, Revenge.

William Shakespeare - The Tempest

Homer - The Odyssey

Claire Louise-Bennett - Checkout 19

Carmen Maria Machado - In the Dream House 

Intan Paramaditha - Apple and Knife

I particularly liked the stories Apple and Knife, The Blind Woman without a Toe and... another one that I have forgotten the title of, and I have since returned this book to the library.

Etgar Keret - Fly Already

I particularly liked the stories Fly Already, Tabula Rasa, and Ladder.

Bora Chung - Cursed Bunny

The first story (The Head) is very memorable, and, for perhaps the first time in my memory, my favourite story from this collection was the longest, a dark fantasy story titled Scar.

Bradley Somer - Extinction

Authors need to be banned from simultaneously writing in the present tense and from the third person perspective — what an ungodly combination! Especially if your protagonist’s name is something mind-numbingly prosaic… Anyway, I thought this was a very flawed but nonetheless interesting book — the first eco-thriller I have experienced. A colleague actually recommended this one as a book that might be worth teaching sometime in the near future.

Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

You know how sometimes sentences can be really beautiful, but the story is totally fucked up? This is one of those, although the disturbing subject matter is perhaps less disturbing than the pro-facist allegory it seemingly represents; this is a reprehensible little book that I really enjoyed reading.

J. L. Carr - A Month in the Country

Chelsea Watego - Another Day in the Colony

Chris Flynn - Mammoth

Those final lines! (Reminiscent of the ending of his short story 22F - another stunner)

bell hooks - Teaching to Transgress

Julian K. Jarboe - Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel

I loved this short story collection - too many favourites to single any out.

Sam J. Miller - Boys, Beasts & Men

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I will hopefully keep adding annotations for most of the above over the next few months - I feel overwhelmed thinking about some of them, and am not sure where I would start...

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I also read selections of short stories from collections - some more than others, mostly privileging the shorter stories where possible - by Kelly Link, Silvina Ocampo, Samanta Schweblin, Julia Armfield, William Faulkner, Grace Paley, Mirandi Riwoe, Chris Flynn, and Anton Chekhov.

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I have currently started reading, all the same time (a terribly slow, hazardous, and unfocused approach) the following:

Homer - The Iliad

Herman Melville - Moby Dick

James Joyce - Dubliners

Eka Kurniawan - Kitchen Curse

Chinua Achebe & C. L. Innes (Ed.) - African Short Stories: Twenty Short Stories from Across the Continent

Saadat Hasan Manto - Mottled Dawn

Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass

Wellcome Collection (ed.) - This Book is a Plant

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Recent Reading

Helen Macdonald - Vesper Flights

This is a beautiful collection of essays that made me want to feel more present in my life and more aware of the life surrounding me.

Carly Finlay (Ed.) - Growing Up Disabled in Australia

I have dipped in and out of some of the other titles in this ‘Growing Up ____ in Australia’ series previously, all of which I have enjoyed reading and consider to be invaluable resources for teaching and learning, but this one might be my personal favourite so far. The intersectional nature of disability creates space for a really diverse selection of authors, stories, and narrative forms here, and I look forward to continually returning to these short works of memoir in the future.

Billy-Ray Belcourt - A History of My Brief Body

Where to start? The British punk band IDLES’ 2018 album title, Joy as an Act of Resistance, perhaps works somewhat as a shorthand, distilled and decontextualised, summary representation of Belcourt’s perspective throughout this memoir, which reads just as much as manifesto than it does memoir: “My thesis statement: Joy is an at once minimalist and momentous facet of NDN life that widens the spaces of living thinned by structures of unfreedom.” 

Belcourt is a First Nations, Driftpile Cree, queer scholar and poet, and this collection of lyric essays is largely concerned with a metaphysics of joy: “In this book, I track that un-Canadian and otherworldly activity, that desire to love at all costs, by way of a theoretical site that is my personal history and the world as it presents itself to me with bloodied hands. To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.”

Wiradjuri writer, poet, teacher, and academic Jeanine Leane has written about Belcourt’s book, published in Australia by UQ Press, for the Sydney Review of Books, much better than I can hope to speak to the text here, and she offers the following understanding of Belcourt’s representation of joy: “Joy... is internal consistency – a personal and purposeful choice to refuse to be either silent or erased by the nation state.”

I have developed an annotation system where, in addition to underlining passages, I’ll place an ‘X’ in the bottom corner of pages that contain particularly significant pages for quick reference; there are too many pages of this book which I’ve felt compelled to mark with multiple ‘X’s to the point where to quote them all here would feel like a definite copyright infringement. Nonetheless, here is just one more of the passages that I want to hold on to: “To care in a more feminist sense is to think outside of a singular life, and to do this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective skin: ‘the fact of being touched by what we touch.’ Care denotes that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one can’t know in advance.” I am really grateful to have read this book, and feel that I am still only beginning my process of reflection.

In the meantime, hopefully without the risk of atrophying that process for myself, I’ll finish by quoting the ending of Leane’s own review: “...the overwhelming message, to NDNs for whom he writes first and foremost, and to First Nations peoples on stolen lands never ceded, comes from his essay, ‘Please keep Loving’:

‘NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn’t to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn’t only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.’”

Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

I am so glad that I read this book, which, surprisingly, makes for an excellent companion piece with bell hooks’ All Above Love: New Visions. After reading Winteron’s autobiographically-inspired first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, last year, I felt urgently, though somewhat sheepishly and self-consciously, drawn to Winterson’s writing. There are simply too many passages that I underlined for me to share them all here; this is much more than autobiography. Here are a few of the passages that I want to remember:

“There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that they things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. [...] When we tell a story, we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. [...] When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of the silence that can be spoken.”

“All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get out language back through the language of others. We can turn the poem. We can open the book. Someone has been there for us and mined the words.”

“Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, the the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.”

“The love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I don’t have to be alone. I don’t have to fight for everything. I don’t have to fight everything. I don’t have to run away. I can stay because this is love that is offered, a sane steady stable love.”

“All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity - the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar.”

Graham Swift - Waterland

After reading Richard Norman’s analysis in On Humanism last year, I was eager to experience reading this novel for myself. The premise is simple, in the sense that there’s an instigating incident early in the story that invites and explanation of cause and effect. However, Swift zooms way out beyond the immediate scope of the subject matter into history, attempting to complicate any simple answer to questions of causation or resolution: “...shall we go back to the beginning? But where’s that? How far back is that?” The constant shifts in time, as Norman has identified, wonderfully captures the phantasmagoria of phenomenon that characterises when we call experience and history, and which can only be seen to explain, as Swift’s narrator says, “a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain.” I loved reading this book, and the feeling it gave my mind of being disassembled, dissected, and suspended in various positions that possessed their own coherence through a unifying incoherence.

The narrator’s view of his brother’s intellectual disability is unsettling, and feels perhaps more disturbing in a moral sense than the author intended. Here I am, though, guessing at a complete stranger’s intentions. It’s not exactly like the narrator is presented as a paragon of virtue. I guess I’m just feeling particularly aware of certain ableist patterns of perception and representation that exist throughout literature at the moment, for the first time, and am starting to feel  weary and wary already.

Linsday Ellis - Axiom’s End

This is a light’n’breezy YA-adjacent sci-fi novel that I enjoyed. Superficially, it is about falling in love with an alien. There is also some business to do with language and communication - but themes are for eight-grade book reports, so never mind about that. Nothing to see here; focus on the aliens! They’re totally not metaphors! I am unsure if I will read the forthcoming sequel, though I suspect I would enjoy watching a film adaptation because, once again: aliens!

Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan

This novel was more generic - in the sense of possessing and adhering to established genre patterns - than I had expected from Vonnegut, though I didn’t realise it was one of his earlier works when I first picked it up. I remember enjoying the story well enough, despite the relative lack of depth and complexity if compared to Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. However, I was particularly moved by one line of dialogue, late in the novel, which reads like a humanistic interpretation of the proximity principle, and has since stayed with me: 

“It took us this long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

As a side note: by contrast, a certain Ben Folds and Nicky Hornby song, which came out when I was finishing high school, has been coming to mind lately as an example of perhaps what I feel is one of the silliest, and perhaps most insidious, perspectives on love that I have (shamefully - and I mean that genuinely, as I believe the framing around the idea, in this instance, inevitably invites some pretty toxic patterns of thinking and behaviour) previously entertained. It is a bop, though, so plug your ears, lest ye too be tempted to indulge in problematic, harmful, self-destructive, adolescent fantasies!

Alan Dean Foster - Alien: Covenant

I hadn’t read a novelisation before, but I wanted to revisit the story of Alien: Covenant ahead of the recent Blank Check podcast episode without actually having to rewatch the film, so I read the novelisation instead. I was thinking it might further develop some of the film’s themes, but I was mostly just looking forward to taking my mind off work as my holidays began. I had not read a novelisation before. Unfortunately, the experience felt not dissimilar to the moment in an episode of Arrested Development when Michael Bluth opens a brown paper bag stored in the fridge with the label on that says ‘DEAD DOVE, do not eat!’ and then looks in it anyway, before sighing and saying, ‘I don’t know what expected’. From what I could remember, the novel was almost exactly the same as the film in both subject matter and structure, with Foster even ‘cutting’ between the points of view of various characters at roughly the same times. I gained a clearer understanding of the plot, maybe, but not much more of an appreciation of any of the ideas the film contains. The writing style is competent and unadorned. However, it did successfully take my mind off of things as the holidays began.

N. K. Jemisin - The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

N. K. Jemisin - The Stone Sky

I was scrolling through the list of Hugo Award winners from previous years, and it was hard not to notice the three-year winning streak that Jemisin holds from 2016-2018 for her science fantasy Broken Earth trilogy. Reading the three post-apocalyptic novels over a fortnight was emotionally draining to the point of numbness at times - somewhat of a ‘what came first, the music or the misery’ situation, though. (I’m writing this in the midst of another lockdown.) Genre fiction seems to do this to me, but the structural ambition of the first novel sustained me through this initial period of uncertainty.

The tragedy of the first book felt stunningly orchestrated, but reading the second novel afterwards felt particularly bleak and harrowing - probably because I thought that such a narrative coup d'état wouldn’t seem possible twice, and probably also because I missed the humour of one of the characters focalised in the first novel. This is, I suspect, by design; finishing the series, the weight of the suffering represented in the middle section doesn’t feel overshadowed or diminished by the ending.

Unlike the unfinished Game of Thrones saga, which is the only other fantasy series I’ve read in recent years, this story does possess resolution. (Is calling it a ‘shattering’ conclusion too on-the-nose, considering that the instigating event within the novels is called The Shattering?) Subsequently, I am glad that I saw the series through, especially as I don’t think I would have appreciated otherwise the full extent of the metaphor(s) at its heart, or had the chance to enjoy the catharsis of the profoundly hopeful resolution.

George R. R. Martin - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Every now and then I accidentally get to wishfully thinking about The Winds of Winter. In its ongoing absence, I try to fill the void with other ASOIAF-related narratives of varying degrees of quality. I enjoyed the first novella of the three that are collected under this title, and the third one, too. I don’t remember Egg having much to do in the second one, though, which felt somewhat staid; Dunk is a character who, without a witty foil like Egg hanging around and stirring up commotion, leaves much to be desired. Speaking of eggs, and chickens, and which of them came first, I’m yet to decide whether I turn to Martin’s work when I’m feeling depressed, or whether his work affects me that way. I just feel kind of numb while reading his work, sometimes...

Madeline Miller - Song of Achilles

By contrast, Miller’s work feels full of life. Her writing is sensory and naturalistic, and sensual, too. I am taking a circuitous passage through the Greek myths, starting with the contemporary revisions and working my way back to the earlier texts; I will read Homer and Ovid soon, possibly. I think I was once the kind of person who, without having read any of it, would have been sceptical of Miller’s work, considering it derivative and watered-down - vulgar, in some sense. It is nice not being that person anymore, and I am glad I read this book. I was moved by it, and I believe that I will enjoy it even more once I gain further understanding of the ways in which it adheres to and departs from the classics.

David Malouf - Ransom

What a delight. This was the perfect book to read after Song of Achilles, as it begins with that novel’s concluding events. Mostly, it is the story of Priam, King of Troy, seeking back the body of his slain son, Hector, from the Greeks. However, it is equally a story about humility, reconciliation, and the joys of dipping one’s feet into cold streams of water. It’s a such a short and giving book that I feel like I will read it again many times in the future.

Madeline Miller - Circe

For a long time, my favourite songs were all about trying to do things. “But I try, I try,” sings David Bowie. “I try and I try and I try and I try,” sings Mick Jagger. “I’ve been trying,” Curtis Mayfield sings. It’s a more specific concept than perseverance, because that word, to my thinking, anticipates success. Trying, on the other hand, is indefinite. It’s for now, possibly forever, and holds no promise. It’s a state of vulnerability, and it’s a choice. It’s the commitment to imagining Sisyphus as happy. And in the words of Circe, ruminating on something Prometheus says to her about the nature of mortal life early in this novel: “We bear it as best we can.” 

Needless to say, I really enjoyed reading this book. It’s of the kind that I feel somewhat melancholy while reading because I realise that, at some point soon, I will be finished reading it - and cannot read it again for the first time. Perhaps having a bad memory is a blessing in this respect; it will be new again soon enough.

Margaret Atwood - The Penelopiad

Reading The Penelopiad felt like I was traveling down the surface of a horizontal cylindrical shape, and Atwood was periodically rotating the ground beneath me, swivelling my point of view between the characters in a way that worked towards achieving a remarkably holistic sense of narrative. I liked it! It made my brain smile! Atwood is such a dexterous writer.

Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita

I wanted to read something that had a reputation for being really, really well-written at a sentence level. In that respect, the novel did not disappoint! This passage, for instance, took my breath away:

“There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slating away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of the receding world,--and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulations.”

There’s an annotated edition, published by Penguin, floating around that I assume provides some insightful analysis of this linguistic wizardry.

What I didn’t expect, naively, was for this to be a novel about language, and the ways in which language can obscure reality - or, even more broadly, as Craig Raine writes in the afterword, “the discrepancy between the dizzy desire and the dingy truth”.

Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I was interested in reading Neverwhere, or Good Omens, as my next Gaiman novel, but I borrowed this book from a friend at work after I saw that the previous person they’d lent it to had left sticky-noted annotations throughout it; the thought of reading the story and someone’s thoughts about the story at the same time was too good to refuse. Here are a few of my own thoughts, sans sticky notes:

- About halfway through the book, the villain says, “Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easy. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush.” (somewhat confused about villain’s nature and/or motivations - seemed to set up a similar thematic focus to Coraline at first?)

- Towards the end of the novel, the narrator says, “A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.” How true is this? This does not feel true to me. How is not changing not simply a form of change? The dichotomising of stasis and change at the heart of this statement does not seem to take into account the significance of context, or the experiences of continuance, prolongation, and liminality. I am unsure as to whether this passage is intended didactically, or whether it is actually intended to be more ambiguous in nature. I suspect the latter, and appreciate the way it functions as a provocation, regardless of whether or not this idea is explored within the narrative.

- I like that the identity of the person who’s funeral the narrator has been attending before the prologue and epilogue is never explicitly revealed - it lends the narrative the feeling of incompletion in a way that feels true to the experience of being alive.

- Gaiman and/or his publishers are very fastidious and consistent with the use of commas within his sentences. Many excerpts seem like they would make for instructive exemplars for writing and grammar courses.

Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain

I was curious to see how a short story can contain the potential for a feature-length film adaptation; I don’t think I’d ever read a short story that a film was based upon before. The jumps forward in time are all here, and they feel just as seamless as they do within the film. The only scene that I could remember being in the film that isn't alluded to in this short story is the one where Ennis is out with his family when he gets into a fight with two men as fireworks explore behind him - a wonderfully cinematic moment. I really enjoyed Proulx’s writing, and I look forward to reading more of her fiction soon.

(Also, god bless Michelle Williams for doing her best to deliver the impossible line, “Jack Twist? Jack Nasty.” Not since Paul Thomas Anderson made Melora Walters say that line from an Aimee Mann song in Magnolia, “Now that I've met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?” has an acting professional been so unnecessarily tortured by a director’s insistence upon adhering to the source text.)

Briony Stewart - Kukimo and the Dragon

This is a delightful children’s book - the kind where the antagonistic force turns out to be a new friend. It possesses tension, but is wonderfully free of conflict. The back cover says it’s recommended for readers over the age of seven, and the book is published by the University of Queensland Press.

Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse

This books is full of lovely illustrations accompanied by generalised, platitudinous assertions that make me feel anxious. “You are loved,” the author insists. But by who, how, to what extent, and why? These are perhaps unfair question to expect a children’s book to answer. They are important questions, though, and I think people (especially little ones) deserve a clearer, more self-aware and critically-informed presentation of a framework by which to understand this phenomenon. bell hooks has much more interesting things to say about love and self-respect, so I’m curious to read some of her children’s literature in the future.

Kae Tempest - Brand New Ancients

“It’s like Howl, I guess?” - my unfair response to too, too many works of poetry.

Qin Xiaoyu - Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry

If it weren’t for Rhian Saseen, an editor at The Paris Review, mentioning this one in their list of favourite books of 2020 (“required reading for anyone who owns an Apple product or a fast-fashion clothing item”), I don’t think I would ever have stumbled across this collection, translated into English by Eleanor Goodman. There are many great poems in this collection. However, there is one poem in particular, ‘Meaning’, by Chen Nianxi, that I think about often. It describes the author’s experience as a demolitions worker in a coal-mine. Without wanting to fetishise the work, it is one of the bleakest poems imaginable.

Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: A Graphic History (Vol. 1 & 2)

Sometimes, we need some pictures to help us eat our vegetables. Sapiens was was the kind of book that I knew I wasn’t going to read myself, and was waiting for a podcast to summarise. The artwork within this graphic version looks great, and, subsequently, I feel like I genuinely remember more ideas from this book than I would have from reading the original.

Brian K. Vaughan - Y: The Last Man (Vol. 4 & 5)

I grew weary waiting for the next instalment of Saga and decided to finish reading one of Vaughan’s completed stories - I had tried previously, but the library didn’t have copies at the time, and, from what I can remember, there was trouble ordering one in because it was, at least temporary, unavailable from distributors. Anyway, I’ve left writing this reflection too long after finishing the series other than to say: I liked it! And that I tried to watch the television adaptation a few nights ago, and thought it was not very good.

Julie Doucet - My Most Secret Desire

It took me a while to pick up this one again after I first purchased it a few years ago; I didn’t give it much of a go the first time I attempted to read it, and felt disappointed by the brevity and absurdity of the some of Dulcet’s earlier comic strips. I was hoping for a more long-form autobiographical work, I guess. Anyway, my expectations were all wrong. I really enjoyed diving back in to this book recently. It reminded me at times of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? in the way that it treats dreams, and the subconscious, as subject matter worth exploring. The strips towards the end of the book, from the mid-nineties, were my favourites. In particular, there’s a recollection of a dream about a Nick Cave concert that then is interrupted by a leap forwards in time, with Doucet reflecting on it years later, in the present - it’s more of a traditional memoir work, I guess, which is less perhaps radical and innovative, but it is nonetheless very satisfying. I’m looking forward to reading Dirty Plotte and some of her more recent work as soon as possible.

Alison Bechdel - The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Like the Winterson autobiography, this one felt cosmically-targeted towards my current state. I think there’s a word for this? I can’t remember the word, or term. Something that involves the prefix ‘sync-’, perhaps. Synchronicity? I thought there was something even more specific. Nonetheless, I loved reading this graphic memoir, and this passage knocked me out of my head:

“I see now that my yearning for self-transcendence is in some ways an attempt to avoid the strain of relating to other people. If you can manage to see past everyday reality, where subject and object hold sway to the view where it’s all one thing, unified and absolute, there’s nothing to relate to. ‘Self’ and ‘other’ might very well be illusions. But I was still going to have to grapple with them.”

Adam Nayman - The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together

Not much to say about this one other than I thought it was very good and that I look forward to borrowing out Nayman’s subsequent book on Paul Thomas Anderson’s films whenever it, too, hits the shelves of the local council libraries around here. Actually, here’s something: this book finally gave me the much-needed motivation to watch Blood Simple for the first time, which I enjoyed immensely. That film has maybe one of my favourite ever cuts to credits: “It’s the same old song / but with a different feeling since you’ve been gone...”

Richard Ayoade - Ayoade On Top: A Voyage (through a Film) in a Book (about a Journey)

In the least-hubristic way possible, this felt like the kind of absurd and ridiculous monograph I might aspire to write someday. Needless to say, it tickled me endlessly. I enjoyed the autobiographical sidebars the most. Here’s a short excerpt that felt like a personal attack: 

“...to be fair...we all bifurcate ourselves. When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks I’ll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I haven’t read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.”

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And I have currently started reading, all the same time (I know, it’s a terribly slow, hazardous, and unfocused approach) the following:

John Armstrong - Conditions of Love

Tony Birch - Dark as Last Night

Lesley Chow - You’re History

Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads

Stan Grant - Australia Day

Joan Lindsay - Picnic at Hanging Rock

Jonathan Rayner - The Cinema of Michael Mann

Tobin Siebers - Disability Aesthetics

Slavoj Zizek - Violence

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- Robert Altman directing Anne Archer on the set of Short Cuts (1993)

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Throughout the last eighteen months or so, I have been trying to make a mixtape inspired by Robert Altman’s 1993 film adaption of some of Raymond Carver’s short stories - almost an adaptation of an adaption.

The idea was for each song to tell a story, like an anthology, but also for all the songs to contribute towards a broader narrative as well, like a short story cycle. I guess, more broadly speaking, you could simply call it a concept album.

Actually, the initial idea was for each song to posses an ekphrastic relationship with the one before it, a series of interconnected vignettes from different characters’ points of view, painting a widescreen picture of a community. It was really difficult to achieve this while still maintaining musical cohesion though, so I have compromised by ostensibly focalising just one character for most of the narrative.

I spent a long time working on the track listing but couldn’t improve upon the first draft, which feels to me like it possess a quality of generational ambiguity while still maintaining a sense of forward momentum. For better or worse, it seems culturally-specific - although this is mostly a vague way of alluding to its cross-continental whiteness.

I have titled of the playlist ‘Shorter Cuts’ because its runtime is significantly shorter than the Altman film.

A friend thought I was going to use this playlist as inspiration for my own novel, or anthology, which hadn’t occurred to me. But it’s an exciting idea, especially because that might be a form of authorship that feels less ethically-complicated than curation. So, in the hope that this might be a generative creative writing activity, here‘s my liner notes / story outline:

Angel from Montgomery by Bonnie Raitt

We meet an old woman. She is married, though her husband works long hours. She dreams of flying to Montgomery.

Factory by Bruce Springsteen

We meet a man who works in a factory. He is possibly the woman’s husband - or is of no relation. He is definitely someone’s father, though. Because he suffers, he wants others to suffer, too.

This Year by The Mountain Goats

We meet the child of a man and a woman - possibly the man and woman from the previous two songs. The child wants to survive and escape.

Pressure to Party by Julia Jacklin

We meet a young adult - possibly the same one from the previous song - who wants to find a way of being that is free from history.

Dancing in the Dark by Lucy Dacus

We meet a young person who is desperate to fall in love and escape their small town.

Shark Smile by Big Thief

We meet someone who is driving down the highway with the person they love when disaster strikes.

Heavy Heart by You Am I

We meet a person in mourning who hasn’t left their house in weeks.

Goose Snow Cone by Aimee Mann

We meet a person who is feeling fragile, trying to heal, finding it hard to be vulnerable with their friends.

I See a Darkness by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy

We meet a person who confesses to their friend that they are finding it hard to have hope for their future.

Lived in Bars by Cat Power

We meet a person who lives in bars, pursuing transcendence or oblivion.

Tennessee by Silver Jews

We meet a person who has met someone and wants to have a future together.

White Cockatoo by The Ocean Party

We meet a person who’s future is starting sooner than they expected.

Baby Bonus by Dan Kelly

We meet somebody - perhaps the partner of the person from the previous song - who is needing support to raise their child.

Mythological Beauty by Big Thief

We meet a person - perhaps the same person from the previous song, or perhaps their parent, or child - who wants their mother to feel safe and loved.

Should Have Known Better by Sufjan Stevens

We meet a person who regrets not contacting their mother before her death, and who feels determined to appreciate the beauty of those family members that remain in their life.

The Practice of Love by Jenny Hval, Laura Jean, Vivian Wang

We meet a person - or a person’s divided consciousness, or persons; perhaps someone from the previous songs - who is growing older, reflecting on the passage of time, mortality, love, and their desire to feel a sense of purpose.

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Recent Reading

Frank Herbert - Dune

This was such a strange reading experience. Herbert’s expositional style is determinedly non-literary, but it’s subject matter and themes are certainly high concept. I guess that’s the defining characteristic of most science-fiction, though; I haven’t read a sci-fi novel in a long time. I think the final sentences are radical (in both the ‘90s sense of the word, and also it’s literal meaning) and moving. Without spoiling the ending, then, here’s the other passage that I keep returning to: “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” In my own mind, I’ve often imagined something similar, seeing myself wading through a knee-deep river of brown, muddy water; Herbert’s metaphor seems better.

Geoff Dyer - Zona

Because watching a film in bits and pieces rarely feels satisfying to me, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find reading - or listening, regarding podcasts - to chronologically-presented commentary very enjoyable. Images linger in my imitation without the threat of immediately being replaced by subsequent others; it feels like the film is replaying in slow-motion watercolours that can I pause or rewind without losing any of the impressionistic detail. I’m not sure if I’m making much sense, but the experience feels less manic than watching a film sometimes feels to me; I can enjoy the film without watching the film, or something. This train of thought seems either very pedestrian or pretentious - either way, I’m suddenly feeling very self-conscious.

Anyway, sometimes I don’t get around to writing my thoughts about a book until too many months have pasted, and I’m subsequently confronted with the limitations of my own memory. Perhaps it’s needless to say, but I have sometimes found this very disturbing and distressing - although I finally understand why, as a child, I couldn’t understand why adults were happy to watch a movie that had already seen before. It probably doesn’t help that much of my reading is done late at night, after teaching all day. Unsurprisingly, then, I don’t remember much more about this one, other than that the reasons I was reading it were that I had read an Alain de Botton interview where he mentioned he was reading it at the time, and that I was planning on watching Stalkeragain with some friends soon afterwards. I definitely remember that it was entertaining - and possibly that I found Dyer’s interpretation of the film to be either a) reductive, or b) elusive. 

Pauline Kael - The Age of Movies: The Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

Another one of Kael’s collections is called I Lost It At The Movies. This one’s title is less exciting, but I’ve enjoyed reading Kael’s scorching review of Fitzcarraldo and her glowing review of Tootsie. I’m yet to see many of the other films discussed in this book, as the table of contents reads like a curriculum that I’ll never completely finish. 

Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Will Burn

Near the end of this book, I paused and stared at nothing. It was quiet. There was no one around. I said aloud, “Everyone is fucked.” Eventually, at some point afterwards, I leaned forwards, stood up from the pink armchair I had been sitting in, and went about my day.

Alain de Botton - Religion for Atheists

I had thought I was developing memory issues, forgetting everything, but it’s reassuring to read that forgetfulness - even when it comes to some of the most important things in life - is a common experience, and one that can be ameliorated by creating and engaging with works of art. The idea that all art is propaganda, but that ‘propaganda’ is a neutral term, is one that Orwell surely would have agreed with.

James Boyce - Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World

Reading this book was a cathartic experience: I realised that I am like just one of many insects, splattered on the windscreen of a bullet train that has been accelerating, indiscriminately, for more than a thousand years. In other words, I felt relieved to understand that I never stood a chance at living a life unaffected by the religious trauma that results from Christian ideas about anthropology; it was nothing personal.

Recently, I have also read the books below, which I will hopefully find time to write about in the coming months:

Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time

Wallace Shawn - Night Thoughts

Richard Norman - On Humanism

Alain de Botton - Essays in Love

bell hooks - All Above Love: New Visions

Jeanette Winterson - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Tara June Winch - After the Carnage

Tim Winton - The Turning

Lisa Taddeo - Three Women

Stephen Greenblatt - Will in the World

Marvin W. Hunt - Looking for Hamlet

Mudrooroo Narrogin - Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature

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Recent Reading

Raymond Carver - Fire

I hadn’t realised Carver wrote poetry. Unsurprisingly, it’s really good. Unlike his short stories, the poems more transparently autobiographical, which I found startling - or maybe he’s simply a convincing writer. The premises of his stories always feel true, even if the endings often draw attention to their artifice. Perhaps the more fleeting and transient mode of poetry suits him in this respect. There was a poem about salmon fishing that I liked. I also particularly enjoyed one of the shorter stories in this collection, The Lie. It’s chilling and concise.

Raymond Carver - Short Cuts

A friend from work lent me this one. It’s a modest compilation, less intimidating in size than Where I’m Calling From, which I’d starting reading a few years ago but had put back on the shelf for a while. Notably, This collection is collated and curated by American film director, screenwriter, and producer Robert Altman, who adapted the stories into a feature film. I thought the following line from Will You Be Quiet, Please? captured the unresolved dramatic tension at the heart of many Carver stories: “How should a man act, given these circumstances? He understood things had been done. He did not understand what things now were to be done.”

Raymond Carver - Where I’m Calling From

Perhaps an email that I sent to that same friend summarises best all that I have to say about this hefty selection of short stories: “I’m trying to say that Carver’s stories present unresolved situations in a manner that feels satisfying. What interests me, specifically, is that their unresolvedness reads as a form of coherence; rather than suggesting that further events need to occur before the experiences can be considered meaningful, Carver’s stories seem to imply that life is fundamentally unresolved. “Further, what I really treasure about his work is that this unresolvedness isn’t presented as catastrophic. Rather, it’s general state of being that one must necessarily be reconciled with in order to get out of bed each day. It reminds me of Camus’ conclusion to The Myth of Sisyphus: “The struggle is enough to fill a [hu]man’s heart…” I hope this idea fills your heart, too.”

As an additional, final thought on Carver’s work, for now, his stories in general read to me like some of the most haunting cautionary tales about masculinity that I’ve read. I’m currently wincing through some more of Philip Roth’s novels, which often seem to achieve a similar purpose, though from behind a veil of irony. Carver’s realism, however, brings to mind the famous aphorism: there but for the grace of God go I. Yan Lianke - The Years, Months, Days

Despite this one being a novella, it took me (what felt like years, was definitely many days, and was actually) months to read this book because I kept putting it down and moving on with my life. It’s a gruelling and laborious read, the story centring around the experience of a village elder who refuses to move from his land during an intense drought. He subsequently spends most of the story suffering under the suffocating heat of the sun and eating rats. Imagine eighty-or-so pages of sunstroke and boiled rodents; I was ready to hate it by the end, only returning to the story out of stubbornness. However, I want to begin reading more Chinese literature, so I persevered and was surprised to find the ending to be both morbidly beautiful and sincerely moving. It didn’t necessarily feel that way at the time, but the more I’ve thought about the story since, the more I’ve been moved by its conceit. My understanding is that much of Lianke’s work is satirical. I confess that I have no idea what the satirical subject might be in this instance.

Sally Rooney - Normal People

I read this one after seeing that Rooney’s editor at Faber had described her as “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,” and fell for the hype. I’ll try avoid making any such comparisons myself. However, I will say that I did like the ending, although was confused to read elsewhere that some people seem to interpret it very differently. Without meaning to spoil anything, I’ll just say that I thought the conclusion was exquisitely frustrating. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood, though - please feel welcome to try and change my mind.

Stefan Zweig - Journey Into the Past

Having only read Chess Story previously, I’m still new to Zweig’s writing. His sentences are extravagantly long, and it’s a pleasure to sink into them. However, I did shoot myself in the foot reading this one, as I expected the story to be longer, not realising that the final dozen-or-so pages of the New York Review of Books edition is an afterward by the translator, Anthea Bell. As such, I was not emotionally prepared for the end of the story, and had to read it a few times to process its meaning - there’s a memorable Verlaine poem that’s referenced. Regardless, Journey Into the Past is a haunting and beautiful story about the way that, as André Aciman writes in the introduction to the NYRB edition, “time can and does indeed commit terrible crimes. It will kill the very best in us and insist that we are still alive.”

Viv Albertine - Music, Music, Music, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Boys, Boys, Boys

As for non-fiction, I saw that Faber and Faber were reissuing paperback editions of some of their best-selling books on music, and the title of this one caught my eye - and the praise from Greil Marcus. Albertine was a member of the British band The Slits, whose brand of abrasive post-punk I was vaguely familiar with beforehand. However, I found Albertine’s writing to be similarly challenging and confrontational in the best possible ways. It’s grimy, sentimental, tender, and vicious all at once. In fact, I enjoyed this memoir so much that I immediately purchased her second one afterwards...

Viv Albertine - To Throw Away Unopened

This one is also excellent. While Music, Music, Music... largely explores Albertine’s relationship with her mother (the title is inspired by her teasing), here - having inherited her divorced parents’ respective journals after their deaths - she takes a look at her father’s life, too, offering a post-mortem on her parents’ relationship. It’s also an update on what Albertine’s been up to in the intervening years, between books - obviously, read the other one first.

Jeffrey Brown - A Matter of Life

This was a graphic memoir I found at my local bookshop. It’s reminiscent of Craig Thompson’s blankets - although much shorter and in colour. I remember it being great. (I should really try write these more contemporaneously.)

Whitney Crothers Dilly - The Cinema of Wes Anderson: Bringing Nostalgia to Life

There was recently a Wes Anderson retrospective at my local cinema, and I took the opportunity to finally read through this book of essays, along with the essays and interviews found in Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection. I might write about my thoughts on Anderson’s filmography more at a later date, but I was struck by how much my opinion on Rushmore, in particular, has changed since I first saw it, nearly ten years ago. It was delightful then, but I find it unbearable now! The Life Aquatic was also a struggle. I didn’t make it to the screenings of The Darjeeling Limited or Moonrise Kingdom, though, so I don’t necessarily have any new thoughts on them. In closing, I thought Dilly’s commentary on the opening sequencing to Moonrise Kingdom represented a salient theme throughout much of Anderson’s work: “childhood is something that disappears from everywhere except one’s memory.”

Matt Zoller Seitz - The Wes Anderson Collection

Emily Nussbaum - I Like to Watch

bell hooks - Feminism is for Everybody

Rebecca Solnit - The Mother of All Questions

Rebecca Solnit - Whose Story Is This?

Philip Roth - The Dying Animal

David Sedaris - Calypso

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Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Parasite (2019)

Burning (2018)

The Irishman (2019)

Pain and Glory (2019)

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

Midsommar (2019)

Marriage Story (2019)

Knives Out (2019)

Us (2019)

High Life (2019)

If Beal Street Could Talk (2018)

Beanpole (2019)

Ad Astra (2019)*

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Toy Story 4 (2019)

The Happy Prince (2019)**

Lorro (2018)

Thunder Road (2018)

The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

My Name is Dolamite (2019)

The Souvenir (2019)***

Booksmart (2019)

Captain Marvel (2019)****

Breaking Bad: El Camino (2019)

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

The Laundromat (2019)

Mid90s (2019)*****

Sink or Swim (2018)******

*There’s a prologue to this film, but it really should just be “This one’s for the fellas.” It feels very much like a film made by a man, for men, about men - fathers and sons, specifically. It’s ridiculous and cheesy at times, with a car chase sequence on the moon; and poetic and lyrical at others, with internal monologue voice-over work from Brad Pitt that is sometimes pretty on-the-nose. The word “compartmentalisation” is said aloud, and it’s basically a film about a guy who has to go to the literal edge of the galaxy to figure out that he should make more of an effort to be emotionally available. The few women in the film are given - in the words of Anthony Lane from The New Yorker - “astronomically short shrift,” and it’s apparent within the first ten minutes that this film has no interest in passing the Bechdel test. But it’s a humanist film (can a sexist film be a humanist film?) set in space, so I’m an easy sell.

**I hadn’t given much thought to Wilde’s fairy tale The Happy Prince in a few years, but I remember thinking that it was one of the most beautiful stories I’d read. Some time passed, and I came to see it as one of the most insidious. I saw it then as a cautionary tale about the importance of moderation as a form of self-preservation, rather than selfless earnestness; I considered it to be a sentimental story about sacrificial love that was unwilling to concede its own tragedy. However, this film, which attempts to cast Wilde himself as a character analogous to his Happy Prince, reminded me that it is not necessary to interpret stories in such a binary fashion. Instead, the film highlights this false dichotomy by illustrating both Wilde’s immense passions and their destructiveness; while it may not be possible to maintain such an intensity of feeling all the time without destroying oneself, it is human to want to, and to try.

***I suspect I will appreciate this film much more when it is eventually accompanied by its forthcoming sequel.

****This is one of those movies where I didn’t think it was a particularly great film, but I cried multiple times - and I wasn’t even on an airplane! To be clear, with the except of the final two films on this list, I enjoyed almost everything I saw in the cinema this year.

*****For a movie named after a specific time period, this one seems to say very little about a particular time or place. I understand that skating culture is a part of what *serif font* Jonah Hill sees as to fundamental the era, but it seems like a narrow vision. However, lest anyone confuse me here, thinking that my critique of this film is simply one of false advertising, I kept waiting for this film to offer something deeper than “don’t judge someone before you’ve walked a mile in their shoes,” or “everyone has skeletons in their closest (even those cool skater guys!)”. The central monologue where this idea is made explicit was… inelegant at best, and a far cry from more recent examples of how to achieve compelling exposition (hello Call Me By Your Name). Perhaps others are seeing something that I’m missing in this film, but it just left me feeling angry.

******I feel like this film wanted it to present itself as being about dignity, but seemed to just be about mindless perseverance? The whole thing whiffed of the meritocratic myth. I don’t know. I had a bad time watching this one...

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- When my sister and I were younger, our parents would often work late. We were occasionally babysat by a family friend named Merriam, who we called Mim. She told these bedtime stories about a character named Charles Chickens, who I guess was a chicken detective? I’m not sure. I just remember the stories were fantastic. Eventually, she moved on, and other babysitters were hired. However, perhaps needless to say, none of them were familiar with the Charles Chickens stories. I was always dismayed. 

Years later, I ran into Mim in a shopping mall. She was a new mother; I was studying at university. I asked her were all those stories used to come from, and she seemed surprised. She explained that she would set up the premise -- Charles Chickens at the markets, for example -- and then would simply ask me what happens next. 

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Recent Reading

Neil Gaiman - Coraline [graphic novel]

It’s been a while between my reading this book and writing this annotation, but I remember thinking this was my favourite version of this story, ahead of the novel and the animated film. I can’t remember the specifics, but I feel like I thought some of plot elements and characterisations were fleshed out more effectively in this adaptation. I love the line about how “The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world.” There’s actually a similar line towards the end of American Gods...

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

I started reading this one while travelling, which felt very surreal; despite it’s seemingly anachronistic title, this is a novel that captures the feeling of being propelled into the future. Simultaneously, this is also a story about the lingering presence of the past. They way these two ideas are synthesised together feels true - it’s a story about survival. I don’t know how else to describe it, but I keep thinking about it, and I treasure the book for this reason.

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

This one is more of a children’s book -- perhaps similarly as scary as The Hobbit? It’s been a while since I read The Hobbit. Nonetheless, I particularly enjoyed the personification of death as The Lady on the Grey -- my own childhood would likely have been less terrifying if I had bee introduced to more ways of thinking about death as a compassionate character.

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus

This was the first literary novel that I ever read, back in middle school. I fell in love with the language -- and the darkness too, probably. Since I’ll likely be teaching with this novel next year, I wanted to revisit the world of Viktor Frankenstein and his creation. However, as I was pressed for time, I listened to an abridged audiobook, narrated by Kenneth Branagh. And it was great! I think the first-person, epistolary nature of the novel translates tremendously well into an oral context. I wish I could say the same for Branagh’s film adaptation, although Deniro as the monster is compelling. Anyway, I was particularly moved by the reoccurring idea of friendship in the novel, which was something I hadn’t noticed before. There is something so lonely and lovely about writing letters. 

Camille Bordas - How to Behave in a Crowd

Like many others, I struggle to find the time to enjoy the short fiction published in The New Yorker. To be honest, I struggle to even find the time to listen to the podcast versions. However, one of the short stories that I have actually read -- and since listened to again and again -- is The State of Nature by Camille Bordas. I find her writing to be both immensely humorous and sobering, and How to Behave in a Crowd delivers in both respects. She’s often been compared to Salinger, although her work seems to possess much more of a sociological, rather than spiritual, emphasis; she’s referenced Garfinkel and Goffman’s studies as influences, whose work I look forward to exploring. It’s been a while since I studied French, but I’m considering brushing up on my comprehension to try reading her as-yet-untranslated earlier novels, too; I am very excited to read more from Bordas. She has two other short stories published in The New Yorker, although I haven’t read the most recent one yet.

Min Jin Lee - Pachinko

Read this one for a book club, but didn’t get to finish it in time. Subsequently, I was made aware of the major plot (in the loosest sense of the word) developments before finishing it myself. I still found it to be a moving story about family, identity, and assimilation, and appreciated the opportunity to learn about the experiences of Koreans in Japan -- albeit through a fictionalised perspective. I honestly don’t have such to say about this one, other than to say that the prose is easy to read (backhanded compliment?) and I wanted to be more affected by the ending (perhaps my heart is cold and withered, although I did find other points of the story appropriately devastating). Speaking of accessibility and endings...

George R. R. Martin - Fire and Blood

I promised myself I wouldn’t read this. Five novels about Westeros was enough, I reasoned; there are other worlds to explore, including the one I actually live in. But then Season 8 of Game of Thrones happened. It wrapped up with all this talk of ‘breaking the wheel’ and I needed context. What was the wheel, exactly? Why, specifically, would characters in that world believe it needs to be broken? Just how unprecedented are the events depicted in the finale? So I turned to Fire and Blood for answers. I’m not sure if I found them -- or that Martin necessarily did as he was writing this fictional history of a continent, either -- but it proved to be surprisingly accessible and enjoyable bedtime reading. Someone please stop me if I ever express interest in reading The Silmarillion, though.

Louis Theroux - The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures

Another audio book! I basically just wanted to listen to someone with a mellifluous British accent speak for an extended period of time. Unsurprisingly, the essays are also great -- there’s a few really memorable final lines. However, I was uncomfortable with the way that Theroux caricatured the speech of his interview subjects. It seemed condescending and demeaning at times, a far cry from his usually humanist and compassionate approach. Weird indeed.

A. O. Scott - Better Living Through Criticism

Heckling isn’t something I’ve ever imagined myself doing, but I almost shouted at a comedian after reading this book. The guy was dragging everyone through this extended bit about reviewers and criticism that was reductionist and seemed misinformed. “But Ronny,” I wanted to offer, “good criticism is art!” It’s like when you believe broccoli tastes gross, but you’ve just never tasted a nice, fresh bunch, you know? Anyway, because I’m a not total idiot, I didn’t say anything -- which comedian has that bit about their doctor asking for a joke, and wanting to say that they will tell this story on stage and this will be the joke? Is this similar, even a little? Not really, I guess. I’m really grateful for this book.

Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch

I am trying my hardest to understand why people like sport. This book has been helpful. It’s very episodical, which can make for a choppy reading experience, but there’s enough genuine insight -- less about sport, and more about being an obsessive person, and just living in general -- to keep me turning the pages. It’s certainly a quieter way to research than sitting in a stadium.

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- The grand tradition of me sharing my unsolicited opinions about movies continues. After each film I saw in the cinemas this year (feature-length new releases), I came home and ranked them in the list below, in order of enjoyment, to try and understand how I felt about them.

In saying that, I actually watched Won’t You Be My Neighbour? and Adrift aboard planes. However, I cried so many high-altitude tears that I felt they deserved places here. There’s something about planes that makes me feel very emotionally vulnerable -- perhaps it’s simply the constant risk of falling from the sky.

My moviegoing highlights of the year were special screenings of The Cameraman, Vertigo, Rear Window, Only Yesterday, Grave of the Fireflies, Andre Rublev, and To Kill a Mockingbird, though, none of which I’d seen before, and I also made it to a screening of Pather Panchali at the end of last year, so I feel like I had a particularly great year of cinema. Perhaps this list reveals my preference for these more self-contained narratives in a year when films like BlacKkKlansman and Vice were experimenting with breaking genre conventions.

Anyway, the list is full of films that I do think are excellent -- save for the bottom few, some of which I walked out of, or probably should have. It’s obviously subjective, and I haven’t seen Roma, If Beale Street Could Talk, or Cold War yet, so it’s also more of a snapshot of where I’m at right now, as opposed to anything definitive. 

There are plenty of more qualified people than myself that have written about them, so please investigate their work if you’re looking for actual analysis. In the meantime, I suppose this is just one small step away from being a thinly-veiled consumer guide. Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals:

Shoplifters

Won’t You Be My Neighbour?

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Phantom Thread

Sweet Country

Custody

Widows

If Beale Street Could Talk

Gurrumul

Eighth Grade

Isle of Dogs

The Favourite

Disobedience

Three Identical Strangers

Terror Nulluis

Sorry To Bother You

Wild Life

Black Panther

Mary Shelley

The Other Side of Hope

Tully

I Kill Giants

Breath

RBG

Midnight Oil: 1984

Farenheit 11/9

Vice

Adrift

First Man

Bohemian Rhapsody

Mama Mia! Here We Go Again

In a Quiet Place

Crazy Rich Asians

A Star is Born

Lean On Pete

Hereditary

Game Night

Mary Poppins Returns

A Simple Favour

Avengers: Infinity War

Incredibles 2

BlacKkKlansman

Crimes of Grindlewald

Oceans 8

Early Man

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Venom

Ready Player One

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Some More Favourite Songs from 2018

- It seems like I was only recently writing about my favourite songs of the year so far, and now the year is already over. Here it comes, there it goes. There’s plenty more songs I could list here, but there are the one’s that I have some thoughts about at the moment.

Sharon Van Etten - Comeback Kid

Alright, this is something like a new wave Springsteen song with all the economy of a Raymond Carver short story. I don’t have much to say about this song, other than it’s an incredibly badass single to drop without context, and that you really should read a copy of the lyrics and take note of the inverted commas -- there are two speakers, and the song came alive for me once I realised that. I know it I said it was like a short story, but it honestly feels like there’s a whole novel here.

The Goon Sax - Losing Myself

I saw The Goon Sax play a few more terrible (read: very excellent) shows this year, and I still think they’re one of the best live bands in Brisbane, although a friend suggested they suspect the band are trying to distance themselves from their own reputation as quickly as possible, and I’m starting to believe it. That’s the thrill of The Goon Sax, though -- they’re always teetering on the edge of falling apart, only one ABBA song away from a complete emotional breakdown.

Kali Uchis - In My Dreams

Remember that time Katy Perry wrote a woke pop song about living in a bubble? Me neither -- it stalled in the charts and then became part of the same background noise it was trying to dispel. Thankfully, Kali Uchis has written one that’s better, because bubble metaphors are played out and dreaming metaphors are eternal. The plastic prince of everything artificial and imaginary himself, Damon Albarn, even stops by to deliver some of his trademark melancholy (“The moments we are happiest / Are the moments that we don't exist��). The song transcends political commentary, becoming a song about the human condition. However, the real magic trick is that the song’s production is so light and dreamy that it feels like a dream itself, and suddenly the impulse to say asleep feels perfectly understandable.

Charli XCX - Girls Night Out

There are many, many sequels to eighties films being produced in Hollywood at the moment, although I’m more excited about the sequels to eighties songs that we’re currently hearing. While lots of journalists and critics have already explained to death the cultural significance of The 1975′s Love It If We Made It (we get it!), Charli XCX’s Girls Night Out is a very necessary sequel to Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, and it’s being criminally overlooked. Produced by SOPHIE and StarGate, the beat sounds like a mobile phone ringtone from the nineties -- only Charli is on the other end of the call, waiting for you to pick up the phone, put on your favourite lip gloss, and have a girl’s night out (“No boys, no boys”). Please remember this is from the same artist who blessed us with Boys just last year.

Cardi B - Get Up 10

So obviously I Like It Like That is the song of the year, but as exuberant and joyful as that song is (“eating halal, driving the Lam’...”), there’s this line from Get Up 10 that I keep thinking about (“Went from making tuna sandwiches to making the news”) because it reminds me of a Biggie Smalls line (“Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner”) which in turn makes me think that I really want someone more learned than me to write an essay about the role of fish in narratives of struggle and success within hip-hop music. Are there more examples of this? Is there more subject-specific context involved in this discourse? Are fish becoming another food-related hip-hop trope, like Grey Poupon? I would say that I want answers, but asking questions is more fun.

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Recent Reading

John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men

I took a slim hardback copy of this one with me to the States earlier this year. It felt particularly special to be reading an international novel in the country of its origin -- I think I’ll try do this more when I’m travelling in the future. I’m sure it’s been noted, but the book seems to share thematic concerns regarding the American dream with other famous works like Death of a Salesman and The Great Gatsby. I think Of Mice and Men is my favourite of them -- the rural setting feels timeless. 

Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

This felt like the first genre fiction I’d read in a long time, which I also read while I was travelling for holidays. It was nice to finally sink into some fiction after years of mostly reading for work rather than pleasure; I had forgotten the joy of forgetting myself.

George R. R. Martin - A Game of Thrones

George R. R. Martin - A Clash of Kings

George R. R. Martin - A Storm of Swords

George R. R. Martin - A Feast for Crows

George R. R. Martin - A Dance with Dragons

Like I said, I really got back into genre fiction last year.

Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism from a Living Female Rock Critic

Hanif Abdurraqib - They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

I have been enjoying reading essays before going to bed. They’re self-contained, and I feel more comfortable late at night reading essays rather than trying to meet the imaginative demands of short stories -- I’m trying to say that the experience feels somewhat analogous to returning to the familiar story world of a novel, where I’m invested in the characters and their perspectives. Anyway, both of the above collections are great.

Jeanine Pommy Vega - Mad Dogs of Trieste

Lionel G. Fogarty - Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future)

Alison Bechdel - Are You My Mother?

Neil Gaiman - Absolute Sandman Vol. 3 & 4

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Favourite Music 2018 So Far

- I have found it harder this year to be reflective. Writing is always something that I want to be doing, but I struggle to magic stories out of the ether the way fiction writers seem to make them simply appear by spending time sitting at a desk. As a result, I try running around and exposing myself to as many ideas as I can until something demands a response. More and more, though, I’m getting better at living on the run--well, an intellectual kind of run, which is less athletic-- moving from one idea to the next without any time to rest. It’s nice to be able to afford this now that I work full time and can purchase subscriptions to streaming services and books delivered to my door, but I’m rushing from one idea to the next so fast that I’m finding it difficult to examine things and learn from my experiences. I need to slow down. When everything is a blur, nothing comes into focus. With that in mind, here are few of my favourite songs from this year, in no particular order.

Ball Park Music - The End Times / David Byrne - Everybody’s Coming To My House

These two songs both seem to actively respond to a sense of dread that feels inspired by recent political events in the western world. Writing requires the ability to observe oneself’s place within a wider context, which is the process I hear Sam Cromack describing in the opening line of The End Times when he sings, "My job is to sit by the buzzer and wait.” David Byrne likewise acknowledges his role as a songwriter, wishing that he were a camera or a postcard that could more simply reflect the world without having to risk the vulnerability that comes from offering a personal perspective. However, he too bears witness to feelings of impending chaos and disorder, resigning himself to the reality that “Everybody’s coming to my house / And I’m never gonna be alone.” The results could easily spiral into a greater sense of claustrophobia and existential dread. “Are you waiting for some kind of meaning?” Cromack asks. However, both songwriters seem to acknowledge that despite the way optimism feels increasingly absurd at a time like this, there remains beauty in the world that can inspire art, and in turn, inspire hope. “We’re only tourists in this life / Only tourists, but the view is nice,” Byrne sings. These songs offer a way not just to perceive the world, though--they’re experiences in themselves. In other words, not only do they diagnose the illness, but they also offer a remedy; Byrne lends some order to the chaos with a jittery drumbeat that will feel familiar to anyone with a nervous heart, and the answer to Cromack’s question arrives in the form of a disembodied voice floating throughout the music, issued like a divine command: “Experience incredible music, yes!” 

Hop Along - How Simple

There is plenty of evidence one could use to support Frances Quinlan’s status as an incredible storyteller. While How Simple isn’t the most lyrically ambitious song on the album, I think it’s pop qualities are ambitious in their own way. Hearing Quinlan exercise restraint is a real delight, and the chorus sounds just as contagious as any of Paramour’s best songs. “Here I am again / At the reserve to drink” is the line I keep thinking about. It simultaneously evokes images of drinking alone in a carpark on a mountainside, near a reservoir; while also describing the quality of suffering that drains one’s reserves of inner strength; and, finally, the line also suggests that the process of making art is a way to survive. It’s like living water.

Parquet Courts - Tenderness

The band that are famous for playing rock and roll at breakneck speed take a few minutes at the end of their latest album to sing a classic karaoke song about the romance in slow dances. It’s hard to imagine this not being the last song on the album--where else in the track list could you sequence this jaunty ode to slowing down time? It’s a series of verses that comes complete with a perfectly-timed fade-out, reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s Turn Me On, I’m a Radio, demanding that the song be rewound again and again and again. More tenderness, please.

Janelle Monae - Screwed / Django Jane

This first song feels hard to defend. Yes, the rapping during the outro of Screwed is the weakest on this otherwise excellent album. Yes, the bridge is technically incoherent. Yes, there is a ridiculous amount of profanity in this otherwise very radio-friendly pop song. However, we can’t always chose what we love, and I love this song. It’s my song of the summer, not just because it’s the loudest and breeziest windows-down song since Katy Perry’s California Gurls. It’s my song of the summer because it makes me think about Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry, which is fitting in the sense that the lines “Everything is sex / except sex, which is power” are commonly misattributed to Oscar Wilde, another white, male poet. This idea recognises both the transformative potential of a non-violent, sexual revolution (“we’ll put water in your guns”) while also acknowledging the fraught system of dynamics involved, in which individuals roles are slippery and vulnerable. However, unlike male writers like Ferlinghetti, Monae is in a position where her expression as a queer black woman in the public sphere feels like a triumph of agency, rather than a well-meaning but nonetheless questionable male fantasy. The following song, Djano Jane, then makes for a victory lap deserving of the standing ovation she demands: “Let the vagina have a monologue.”

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- Port Macquarie smurf culture