More Michael Moorcock Than You Can Swing a Runeblade At...

How many of these (scroll down, but later) magical masterpieces of Swords and of Sorcery have you read? 

E@L has x-ed (and reddened) those he has ploughed through (27 is it?), and y-ed (and purpled) those he owns but hasn’t got around to yet, not in this realm anyway. You’ll notice that he has mainly done the pre-1980 novels and stories as he eventually turned away from such childish fun and adventure, thanks to pressing concerns, and became a boring old man at the age of 23. Maybe he overdid the fantasy schtick at the time… Maybe the guilty indulgences stole his S&S soul?

Anyway, E@L temporarily embedded his blade into Moorcock back in 1977/78 at the urging of a fellow unworldly student radiographer (who went on study for a real job as a dentist while E@L hung around on the cusp of unemployment and failure). 

They are so easy to read, these slim volumes, and so much fun, at least once you get a delightedly morbid taste for soul-stealing swords and demon infested nether-realms and lots of gruesome and bloody deaths, and those dead who don’t stay dead, but aren’t zombies either, thankfully, as that would be, like, hey, a cliché. 

E@L means, hey, if you're 20 years old, working full-time, studying on the evenings, are newly married and with a young baby to focus on, why wouldn’t you retreat into a fantasy world at every opportunity?

You weren’t free to go surfing on a whim anymore, at the drop of an on-shore wind and the rise of a solid swell…

~~~~~~

[Many years later]

So bring on the black mists and the intrigue of the gods and elementals! And get out your guitar and play some Hawkwind songs (if you know any; E@L doesn’t!).

Let’s scour the realm of second-hand bookstores and of charity store like the Salvos or Vinnies, submit ourselves to the fates of heretical churches and their sly fêtes. 

Let’s overflow E@L’s already well fucking overflowing bookshelves with the adolescent fantasy dreamworld of Michael Moorcock!  

More Moorcock! More Moorcock!

If you’re wondering WTF; E@L is listening to the audiobooks of the Elric saga on his morning walks, and loving them, hence this post. 

~~~~~~

E@L considers his poor — perennially on the knife-edge of failing -- performance in his initial career (radiographer, as mentioned) due to being distracted by these stories of eternal champions like Erokosë, Jerry Cornelius, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum, and, of course, the pale, thin-blooded, reluctant, emperor, Elric of Melniboné (not MEL-kneebone but Mel-NIB-onay) with Stormbringer, his runesword, the stealer of souls! 

It was not just the family stuff.

E@L means, hey, like, awesome, right?

~~~~~~~

E@L attributes his poor performance at high school to his being distracted by those surfing whims when it blew off-shore and tide was right and swells were a solid 4-6ft  (or lower)…

~~~~~~~

E@L attributes his poor performance  at surfing (he was OK, but not a star) to his mother being reluctant/unable to buy more and better surfboards for him. And for him being shit-scared of big waves. He could only afford a decent board when he left school and got a job, but see above re-marriage and progeny and work and study, and guess how well that worked out for him.

Not that he is bitter, twisted, and has his hand on the rune-encrusted obsidian pommel of his otherwordly blade…

No, his hand is on a double G&T.

~~~~~~~

- [ ] The Elric of Melniboné series (1961–2022), including:
                  - [ ] The Dreaming City (1961)
                  - [x] The Stealer of Souls (1963)
                  - [x] Stormbringer (1965, revised 1977)
                  - [x] Elric of Melniboné (1972)
                  - [x] Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976)
                  - [x] The Weird of the White Wolf (1977)
                  - [ ] The Vanishing Tower (1977)
                  - [ ] Elric at the End of Time (1981)
                  - [y] The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)
                  - [y] The Revenge of the Rose (1991)
                  - [y] The Citadel of Forgotten Myths (2022)
- [ ] The Dorian Hawkmoon series (1967–1975), including:
                  - [x] The Jewel in the Skull (1967)
                  - [x] The Mad God's Amulet (1968)
                  - [x] The Sword of the Dawn (1968)
                  - [x] The Runestaff (1969)
                  - [x] Count Brass (1973)
                  - [x] The Champion of Garathorm (1973)
                  - [x] The Quest for Tanelorn (1975)
- [ ] The Erekosë series (1970–1987), including:
                  - [x] The Eternal Champion (1970)
                  - [x] Phoenix in Obsidian, aka The Silver Warriors (1970)
                  - [ ] The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell (with Howard Chaykin) (1979) (graphic novel)
                  - [ ] The Dragon in the Sword (1987)
- [ ] The Corum series (1971–1974), including:
                  - [x] The Knight of the Swords (1971)
                  - [x] The Queen of the Swords (1971)
                  - [x] The King of the Swords (1971)
                  - [x] The Bull and the Spear (1973)
                  - [x] The Oak and the Ram (1973)
                  - [x] The Sword and the Stallion (1974)
- [x] Behold the Man (1969)
- [x] Breakfast in the Ruins (1972)
- [ ] The Time Dweller (1969)
- [ ] Sailing to Utopia, comprising:
                  - [ ] Flux (1962)
                  - [ ] The Ice Schooner (1966)
                  - [ ] The Black Corridor (1969)
                  - [ ] The Distant Suns (1975)
- [ ] The Wrecks of Time, aka The Rituals of Infinity (1967)
- [ ] The Sundered Worlds, aka The Blood Red Game (1965)
- [ ] The Fireclown, aka The Winds of Limbo (1965)
- [ ] The Twilight Man, aka The Shores of Death (1966)
- [ ] Kane of Old Mars (1998 compilation volume originally published as three books in 1965, 346pp)
- [ ] The Lost Canal (novelette) (2013)
- [ ] The Chinese Agent (1970)
- [ ] The Russian Intelligence (1980)
- [ ] Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (1999) (graphic novel)
- [ ] The Metatemporal Detective (2007) (collection)
- [ ] A Nomad of the Time Streams:
                  - [ ] The Warlord of the Air (1971)
                  - [ ] The Land Leviathan (1974)
                  - [ ] The Steel Tsar (1981)
- [ ] The Dancers at the End of Time sequence (1972–76):
                  - [y] An Alien Heat (1972)
                  - [y] The Hollow Lands (1974)
                  - [ ] The End of All Songs (1976)
- [ ] Legends from the End of Time (1976)
- [ ] The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming, aka A Messiah at the End of Time (1977)
- [ ] Gloriana (1978)
- [ ] My Experiences in the Third World War (1980)
- [ ] The Opium General and Other Stories (1984)
- [y] Mother London (1988)
- [ ] Casablanca (1989) – short stories
- [y] King of the City (2000)
- [ ] London Bone (2001) – short stories
- [ ] Kaboul (first published in French) (2018
- [ ] The Jerry Cornelius quartet of novels and shorter fiction:
                  - [x] The Final Programme (1969)
                  - [x] A Cure for Cancer (1971)
                  - [x] The English Assassin (1972)
                  - [x] The Condition of Muzak (1977)
                  - [ ] The Cornelius Quartet (1977 compilation volume, 974pp)
                  - [ ] The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century (1976)
                  - [ ] The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius (1976)
                  - [ ] The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, aka Gold Diggers of 1977 (1980)
                  - [ ] The Entropy Tango (1981)
                  - [ ] The Alchemist's Question (1984)
                  - [ ] A Cornelius Calendar (1993 compilation volume, 554pp)
                  - [ ] The New Nature of the Catastrophe (1993 anthology collecting Jerry Cornelius stories by Moorcock and others, edited by Moorcock and Langdon Jones, 448pp)
                  - [ ] Firing the Cathedral (novella) (2002)
                  - [ ] Phase 1:A Jerry Cornelius Story (novella) (2008)
                  - [ ] Modem Times 2.0 (novella) (2011)
                  - [ ] Pegging the President (novella) (2018)
                  - [ ] The Fracking Factory (novella) (2018)
                  - [ ] The Wokingham Agreement (novelette) (2022)
- [ ] The von Bek sequence:
                  - [ ] The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981)
                  - [ ] The Brothel in Rosenstrasse (1982)
                  - [ ] The City in the Autumn Stars (1986)
- [ ] The Pyat Quartet:
                  - [ ] Byzantium Endures (1981)
                  - [ ] The Laughter of Carthage (1984)
                  - [ ] Jerusalem Commands (1992)
                  - [ ] The Vengeance of Rome (2006)
- [ ] The Second Ether sequence:
                  - [ ] Blood: A Southern Fantasy (1994)
                  - [ ] Fabulous Harbours (1995)
                  - [ ] The War Amongst The Angels (1996)
- [ ] The Elric/Oona Von Bek sequence:
                  - [ ] The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
                  - [ ] The Skrayling Tree (2003)
                  - [ ] The White Wolf's Son (2005)
- [ ] Doctor Who:
                  - [ ] The Coming of the Terraphiles (2010)
- [ ] The Sanctuary of the White Friars
                  - [ ] The Whispering Swarm (2015)
                  - [ ] The Woods of Arcady (2023)
                  - [ ] The Wounds of Albion (TBC)

~~~~~~~

Phew! Busy guy that Michael Moorcock!

~~~~~~~

Sigh.

E@L considers his poor history with girlfriends (only JUST plural) and wife (singular) to being obsessed with surfing. And himself. And being obsessed by obscure (to many) books, and to only ever learning four songs on his guitar and playing them on heavy repeat for 50 years yet never remembering the chord changes correctly.

And just being a selfish, ignorant dickhead in relationships, with zip EQ (see previous paragraph for pathetic excuses), and so here he is at 67, still alive despite the best effort of the invidious fates, the anger of the chaotic gods and spirits on this realm and others, only by having used the Mechanical Magic of Modern Medicine to confound his destiny and his malicious DNA, sitting alone on his balcony with a double G&T and an iPad, a thorax marred with multiple scars, a gurgling colostomy bag, and a list of the millions of books he hasn’t read, not to mention the one he hasn’t written. 

Pleasant enough, right?

~~~~~~~

But, oh, this post has gone off the rails suddenly, hasn't it? 

But like, hey! What more could one expect from that plate of cheese and crackers, that (second) double G&T, and

E@L

Foundation And The Eleusian Mysteries.

From the Hmm, I Did Not Know That, and The No-one Who Reads My FB Feed Cares So This Goes To The Blog files comes this fascinating connection:

In Series 1 Epsisode 8, "The Missing Piece" of Asimov's Foundation on Apple+, "Brother Day embarks on a journey that no other Cleon has ever attempted." This is a religious ceremony that involves a long arduous walk in the sun without food or water that is deadly for many, called The Great Spiral. Br Day expects to reach a sacred cave, referred to as a womb by a priestess (note the rebirth motif) where salt in the water has some mind-altering property that may grant him a vision of the three goddesses (mother, maiden and ... cleaning lady?) and some enlightening message.

And hopefully some aloe vera for that sunburn.

~~~~~~~

It just so happens that The Eleusian Mysteries of ancient Greece bear a striking resemblance, at least part, to this fictional ritual journey. The Mysteries involved a once in a lifetime experience for the elite of the time and requiring them (people like Marcus Aurelius!) to oversome some harsh trials/tests/etc? and reach a certain underground temple or cave, ritualistically descend into hades and return with the goddesses Persephone and Demeter (daughter and mother).

References to re-birth from a seed (it obviously began as an an agricultural festival), visions, a revelation of spiritual and mental enlightenment, and eventually, as the mysteries evolved, eternal life and maybe even becoming a god. Magic mushrooms or some other psychedelic may very well have been involved, but we don't know as the rites were (the clue is in the name) a Mystery.

Anyone seen Marcus?

E@L couldn't find a correpsondence to this TV show's Great Spiral subplot in the books by polymath Isaac Asimov. Well, research, as in he did a search for "cave" and "goddess" in the seven Foundation ebooks he has, with no result. Maybe the scriptwriters' put it in? Seems unlikely. It must be there. Anyone here read them all?

~~~~~~~~

Anyway, it was an interesting (to E@L) parallel, even though he has probably misread the details in the Wikipedia entry completely as he was drinking a double negronic (negrotonic? Anyway, negroni topped up with tonic) as he drafted this.

~~~~~~~~

No doubt a dunk into reddit or somesuch chat area, even Google, would provide E@L with a wealth of discussion on this obvious, to many, association and several PhD theses have already been submitted on it and Stephen Fry probably explained it on Qi (even though he doesn't do it anymore) or in his latest book, and it is only because E@L lives in isolation from the cultured world (the bars of Bangkok and breweries in Singapore?) that he can claim to claim it as his own discovery.

To be totally honest, the correspondence hit E@L while he was doing his daily constitutional around said culturally isolated home village, sipping his barista-brewed flat white, and listening to a recent Sam Harris podcast on the use of psychedelics in religious ceremonies in the ancient western world, and the blindingly obvious pagan origin of many Christian rituals, natch. The guest describes the Mysteries in as much detail as, even more than, any brain could hold onto, least of all the exploding one of

E@L

From The SMW* Files Of E@L

E@L has just discovered an excellent book review podcast called Backlisted, where they pull out an overlooked or under-appreciated book from some time back and get experts to go over the tome’s inexplicable and unfortunate desuetude.

~~~~~~

The first one he listened to while he was doing his morning walk yesterday. The topic was M. R. James, the Eton don who wrote “weird” and ghostly tales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically his Ghost Stories of An Antiquary from 1904.

~~~~~~

The second episode he Iistened to while he was on the road back from No1 son’s place in Melbourne this afternoon. This episode was about Diane Johnson’s 1972 biography, The True History Of The First Mrs Meredith And Other Lesser Lives. George Meredith, the husband in question, being the early Victorian era novelist.

~~~~~~~

After the excellent discussions on the podcasts, E@L bought them both for his Kindle (0.99c for the James) and after dipping an eyeball into both he can heartily recommend them! Johnson’s book is brilliantly entertaining despite what you might think of as a dry topic. It was reissued by NYRB a few years ago, so obviously it is not all THAT overlooked.

Irrelevant. 

Look, listen, and learn. Here’s the point:

Kindle Loc 32 of Ghost Stories: “…of a more formidable prosecutor than a termagant wife.”

E@L had to look up termagant when he read it this morning in the first of M.R. James’ stories; easily done on the Kindle: “Harsh-tempered or over-bearing woman.” From the moon wandering (vagant) between three (tri = ter) places: heaven, earth, and hell. E@L can’t recall reading that word in the last few decades, but it was vaguely familiar. Such an obscure and extremely rare word, yeah?

After a spine-tingling (not really) jaunt through a few of James’ quite short spooky stories, E@L thought he should check on the Johnson biography this evening! He found it terrifically witty and clever, and then…

Kindle Loc 361 of The True History: “… was left by his wife, a termagant and too clever by half; she took their little boy Tom…”

~~~~~~
Jaw. Drop. Floor.
~~~~~~

WWWwwwwwwwhat is going on here? Seriously. we mean, WTAF? Guess who's afraid to pick up another book now? 

Looking anxiously over his shoulder for a spooky apparition of a possibly termagant Mary Ellen Meredith née Love Peacock creeping in from one of James’ eerie tales is

E@L!


*Spooky. Mystic Weird.

Absolutely Brillat!

Someone anticipated my blog many, many moons ago...

~~~~~~~~

"Another  reproach which might be levelled against me is that I sometimes let my pen run away with me, and tend to turn garrulous when I have a tale to tell. But is it my fault if I am old? Is it my fault if I am like Ulysses, who had seen the cities and ways of life of many peoples? Am I to be blamed if I include a little of my own biography?"

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (Physiologie du goût), 1825.

~~~~~~~~~~ 

E@L found a Folio Society edition from 2008, in mint condition, in a second-hand store in Geelong for a bargain AUD25.

How that last  quote, eh?

'I looked about me and took note of what I saw, and often at the most sumptuous banquets I have been saved from boredom by the pleasure I derived from my observations'

Brilliant Brillat. Worth the money right there.

We are talking (and observing pleasurably) about: recalcitrant toasters in hotel buffet breakfasts; komplex kopi concerns; restaurant capers and caprices.

Much of E@L's blog in an edible nutshell! 

~~~~~~~~~

Interesting also that "goût" is essentially, says arrogant anglophone, spelled the same as "gout" (at least you don't have to cut and past the latter from somewhere), so many may mistakenly think of this foody's treat as a treatise on the afflictions associated with improper uric acid metabolism! 

Ha! Nuh!

Fortunately, fingers and toes crossed, this is one of the few afflictions that has not (yet) brought low that gallavanting gourmand of the grand guignol that was his former expatriatdom, 

E@L

QOTD

 

Mario wrote very seldom; in fact, for a long time past, the only signs of a writer about him were the pen and blank sheets of paper always lying ready on his desk. Those were the happiest days of his life, given up to dreams, and free from teasing practical problems; a sort of second childhood, more desirable even than the maturity of  a successful writer, whose words flow too glibly and with too little effort to the paper, leaving an empty husk which mistakes itself for ripe fruit.  Italo Svevo, The Hoax. (1929)

 

You see? You see? This is why E@L keeps loads and loads of books. Boxes and boxes of them. He picks up a volume at random and this gem of a paragraph unfolds before his eyes. How can one not relish that contradictory idea: the happiest days of his writing life were when he wasn't writing, even though he still thought of himself as a writer. So self-depricating in its contrariness, so freshly thought, so pretentiously unpretentious, so oxymoronical, so... so Svevoesque (new word, first in a long time!). 

This volume also contains The Story of The Nice Old Man and The Pretty Girl - a classic...

Sigh. E@L doesn't write anymore, but, unlike Mario, he doesn't kid himself/others that he's a writer either. 

Happy days for 

E@L

Disquiet In The Soul

Here are the Kindle notes I highlighted from the book I finished recently: Soul by Andrey Platonov.

Background: It's 1935 Russia, a writer is sent to find and reunite the cultural people of his youth, who had been dispersed and lost in the deserts between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. They don't want to be found, however, don't want to be reunited. They haven't the will to live or the energy to die. And yet...

Sound depressing? Well, it isn'... OK, well it is a little bit. Naturally I loved it, mainly for lines like these:

~~~~~~

"We can live without thinking anything and pretend we’re not us.”
==========

There are no living people here, only people who haven’t yet died.
==========

They sat on the ground and fell into thought, even though, given their advanced years, they had already had more than enough time to think everything through and arrive at truth.
==========

Sigh. I should be wise by now.
==========

“Things just say themselves in my mouth—I don’t know why.”
==========

...from them came the sounds of ... people carrying on their old discourse with one another, an eternal conversation, as if they lacked the wit to come to a definite conclusion and fall silent.
==========

...this master of samovars was unable to forget what, even just once, had touched his heart, and anyway life is too short — you can’t forget everything.
==========

The song told how every human being has their own pitiful dream, some beloved insignificant feeling, that separates them from everyone else — and this is how the life inside us closes our eyes to the world, to other people, and to the beauty of the flowers that live in the sands in spring.
==========

"I’m not a rich man, I’ve nowhere to live but my own body.”
==========

~~~~~~~

You get the idea.

~~~~~~~

Doesn't that all sound like Fernando Pessoa? His Book of Disquiet - I've blogged about him before - sits on my bedside table. The Portuguese multi-poet-personality from the same era as Platinov. It must be a modernism thing. I wonder if anyone has ever linked them before?

Here are some Pessoa quotes (pasted from Goodreads, not me - you want me to get up, go to the bedside table 12 feet away, pick up the book and find some quotes myself? What are you on? OK maybe later.):


“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
==========

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
==========

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it”
==========

You get the idea. Life is shit, people are shit, but hey, Tim Tams make an excellent chocolate straw for your white Russians, and someone else is always more unhappy with things than you are (or are pretending to be).

Pretending? Just ask

E@L

On Forgetting Everything.

Quote of The Day For The Aging (like E@L):

"Everything I've lived through I've forgotten as if it were something I had only vaguely overheard." Fernando Pessoa: The Book Of Disquiet.

~~~~~
For example -

Visiting Friend: That's near where you took me last time I visited.
E@L: You've been to Singapore before?
Visiting Friend (confused): About three months ago. We watched the footy with your mates. I was with my girlfriend. Same as the time before.
E@L (even more confused - no memory of this whatsoever): Oh, that's, um, right.
~~~~~

It's time E@L was put down. Seriously.

He did recall eventually, about 30secs late. How can anyone have conversation with this person?

~~~~~

E@L tries to read a snippet of Pessoa before he goes to sleep. His mordant pessimism makes your shitty day seem like brilliant success and you sleep easy.


E@L

Want of Dexterity

When I was blogging more frequently, all those joyous years ago, my not-so-subtle (and no-so-secret, and not-at-all-unique) plan was get a grunch (new word) of posts together with a similarity of theme and tone that I could put into a coherent order, so that I'd have less of the discontinuous non-narrative that blogs inevitably are - rants, pseudo-essays, and shady stories all over the place - and with a little bit of fiddling and tweaking and filling in of gaps, I'd create a readable, unitary, written/typed object - aka a book.

Sigh.

~~~~~~~

Still on about The Trip TV show... In the second series, in Italy, Rob Bryden is forever chasing "Byron slept (well, he went to bed) here", and "Shelley punched someone out here" landmarks for him to be photographed at, and I was wondering where he found his information on this their last, epic Grand Tour (which included Lausanne, as mentioned in the previous post).

So I searched for a book about those rapscallion poets on the loose.

The book that Rob had most likely read was Edward John Trelawny's 1858 first hand account, Recollections From The Last Days Of Shelley And Byron. There is a NYRB edition out, but they don't have it, or any other edition, in stock in Singapore at the moment*. I was thinking to pick it up this weekend, before I fly off again: Tokyo this time (I'm currently in KL). I searched for an eBook to hold me over, but none is available.

It is not on Gutenberg Press either.

But there is a scanned copy at Scribd, the on-line eBook library, but that requires a subsription to read off-line or on a mobile app.

ANYWAY, point of story...

One the first page of the preface I found this:

"I wrote what is now printed, not systematically, but just as the incidents occurred to me, thinking that with the rough draft before me it would be an easy, if not agreeable, task to re-write the whole in a connected form; but my plan is marred by my idleness or want of literary dexterity."

~~~~~

Idle and wanting literary dexterity. So it's not just

E@L


* This is the sort of book you'd be rummaging for ceaselessly in dusty second-hand bookstores, and loving every minute of it.

Savoyard - ambiguation

Interesting. Not ironic, merely coincidental. Merely an example of Littlewood's Law, roughly: "A person can expect what appears to be a "miracle", that is, something with odds of around a million to one, to happen to them about once a month."

What is this rare, nay, semi-miraculous proto-religico/mathematico occurrence, you ask. What has brought once prolific and popular blogger E@L back from the brink, yea, from staring into the blind, echoless abyss of not writing much these days?

E@L has come across the word "Savoyard" twice in as many weeks. It was a new one on him, as are most references to cultural things.

Wow! hey?

~~~~~~

In his semi-autobiographical 1964 novel My Brother Jack, the Australian writer George Johnston* has his proto-self, proto-agonist David Meredith, working at an elite printing firm in Melbourne (as did Johnston). The printers were more than mere craftsmen: they were also artists, designing and etching the posters and advertisements themselves, as commissioned.

But they had other, dare I say cultural** interests:

"... because every one of them was a fanatical Savoyard, and at any hour of the working day would be as likely as not to burst into a chorus from HMS Pinafore or Yeomen of the Guard or Pirates of Penzance, then everyone would join and the whole studio would rock to Gilbert and Sullivan airs..."
(approx location 1210 of 6276 on Kindle)


Savoyard: 2: a person enthusiastic about or connected with Gilbert and Sullivan operas: so called from the Savoy Theater in London, where the operas were first presented. (Dictionary.com)

~~~~~~~

In her most-amusing 2004 novel (and aren't they all?) The Finishing School", Muriel Spark arranges it so that the students of College Sunrise in Ouchy, a lakeside town just out of Lausanne, leave their laptops and knapsacks behind and head off on a ferry down Lake Geneva to the Chateau of Chillon.

It was while he was in Ouchy itself, in 1816, that Lord Byron, who was with Shelley on holidays [i.e. fucking whomever they could catch], wrote an allegedly well-know poem [not to E@L] about a certain prisoner who was kept in a dungeon there (Chillon) for six years. François Bonivard, the Prisoner of Chillon, was imprisoned (with his two brothers, according to Byron) in an underground cell because of his radical political views, espousing the independence of the Genevese area from The Duchy of Savoy. The Duchy at the time of Bonivard's incarceration [1530's or so] included a chunk of what is now eastern Switzerland: all the shores of Lake Geneva, from Geneva around to Lausanne, and then to Montreux. Chambery, in what is now France (Savoie or Haute-Savoie, can't be fucked looking it up - E@L is 6hrs into this post already) was then the capital, but Savoy included the Piedmontese area around Turin, and down to the Mediterranean at Nice. Lots of geo-politics going on as you would imagine. But of that, more later.

OK, so the students are told to ponder on Byron's poem while they were at the Chillon chateau.

What next befell me then and there
I know not well—I never knew—
First came the loss of light, and air,
And then of darkness too:
I had no thought, no feeling—none—
Among the stones I stood a stone,
And was, scarce conscious what I wist,
As shrubless crags within the mist;
For all was blank, and bleak, and grey;
It was not night—it was not day;
It was not even the dungeon-light,
So hateful to my heavy sight,
But vacancy absorbing space,
And fixedness—without a place;
There were no stars, no earth, no time,
No check, no change, no good, no crime
But silence, and a stirless breath
Which neither was of life nor death;
A sea of stagnant idleness,
Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!...

Listen: Chris, one of the more precocious students is writing a novel about Mary Queen of Scots, the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, and the assassination of her recently repositioned personal seckertary and alleged boy-toy, David Rizzio, formerly of, wait for it, the Duchy of Savoy - he was born near Turin. When Rizzio was stabbed 56 times in 1566, Lord Darnley was then estranged from Mary, an 'orrible 'usband [marry in haste, repent in hell not long after] who had been buggering none other than Rizzio for many a moon previously. He feared most murderously that his (Rizzio's) ascendancy in her (Mary's) eyes threatened him (Darnley) both politically and romantically. [E@L is toying most flagrantly with history here, having only half-remembered pieces of the story from a recent Melvyn Bragg podcast, and less-than-half-read Googled snippets to go on]. After Rizzio's body is disposed of, Darnley, King of Scotland, gets, naturally enough for those days, back with his once-hated and conspired-against Queen. But he is murdered himself next year by the Earl of Bothwell, who marries MQoS after raping her [rape in haste, marry and murder at leisure], and the rest is history. But Chris's "excitingly written" twist on the story is that Darnley was in fact murdered by assassins sent from Savoy by Rizzio's family of diplomats (aka spies). Whoof.

Anyway, [are you still with me?] Chris, the aforesaid precocious student and inchoate novelist at the Swiss finishing school of the novel's (Spark's) title, was on the ferry, thinking of Bonivard and Rizzio, who were, #foreheadslap, roughly contemporaries:

"They might have met. They lived in different worlds yet it was not impossible that the lordly Savoyard should encounter the young Piedmontese diplomat who won his way into the courts of Europe." (Pg 23.)


Savoyard: 1: a native or inhabitant of Savoy. (Dictionary.com)

~~~~~~

But of course, checking the maps of the region, although it was difficult to pin down exactly the gerrymandering going on over the centuries with Google and not a proper historical atlas, E@L has discovered a possible misfiring in Spark's research/reasoning.

Turin was, as mentioned, in the Duchy of Savoy during the 16th century, and became the capital in 1563. It had been part of Savoy for six centuries and would remain so for two or more, um, more. Rizzio would have considered himself as much a Savoyard as Bonivard, rather than just a Piedmontese. [Perhaps, but for the sake of spectacularly iconoclastic blogging, let's say, Yes]. And, more controversially, Bonivard, imprisoned as a Genovese secessionist, might justly bristle at being called a Savoyard, when he most devoutly wished to be anything but one.

The history of the area is complex, to say the least at this time of night. Lausanne and Geneva did not remain in Savoy much longer. Those of the House Savoy became, firstly, the Kings of Sardinia (which included a state of Savoy that commenced below Lake Geneva, and had Piemonte as a separate state), and then the Kings of Italy, reigning from Turin, after the unification (also once called the "Piedmontisation") of Italy.

~~~~~~~

As another aside, while Muriel was writing this, her last novel, in a little village in Tuscany (about 60km from where E@L experienced the infamous "angina incident" of 2012), a political group in Savoie and Haute Savoie, the areas of France around Chambery (former capital of the Duchy, remember?), The Savoyan League, were calling for the unification and independence of the French speaking regions of l'ancien duché de Savoie. They gained 5.39% of the vote in the area in 1998, but failed to turn up at the 2004 elections.

~~~~~~~

Fascinating. Maybe not in your opinion, certainly in the opinion of

E@L



[Footnotes]

* E@L is reading My Brother Jack (he should have done so many years ago) because George Johnston is mentioned, photographed even, with his wife Charmian Clift, in
So Long, Marianne: A Love Story, the bio-story of the muse of Leonard Cohen's classic song, which E@L found in Kinokuniya and still hasn't started reading because: see above.

This had prompted E@L to pull out his almost as unread copy of Garry Kinnane's wonderfully titled 1986 biography of George Johnston, George Johnston: A Biography. Inside of which, E@L found four mysterious pressed flowers.

After some Facebook sleuthing, it turns out that it was the Ex who had placed the flowers there when she was reading the book back in the day - we are talking nearly 30 years ago.


** "Culture" and "Gilbert and Sullivan" - uncomfortable bedfellows, some snobs might say.

That In Aleppo Once or Twice...

E@L's father was a damn good cricketer. E@L's No1 son is a damn good cricketer when his back and his knee don't take him down. E@L was a damned cricketer, and a laughing stock on occasion (wrong shoes for turf, slipped over when delivering the first ball, etc...).

For the 1952-53 season, E@L's dad won the batting averages for the PMG (Post-Master General, now split into Australia Post and Telecom) cricket team in a town in country Victoria. No doubt a social level competition. But hey. E@L's son has more information on his cricketing prowess. On one particularly splendid day he bowled out the other team almost single-handedly, and then won the match with his batting - 106 not out!

They gave a him book, called Dust On My Shoes, by Peter Pinney. It was published in 1948 by the great Australian house of Angus and Robertson (still going on) and purchased at a salubrious bookstore named Cowans Newsagent in the lakeside town of Colac. (Where E@L was born.) The story is of a young Australian man, something of a rake E@L gathers, making his way, single-handed, across the Middle East and South Asia, from Greece to Burma just after the end of WWII. E@L hasn't read the book, though as a child he always wondered at in his mother's small library (the remnants of his father's, he presumes, plus some childhood books for E@L's sister) and was particularly entranced by the photos. His late father-in-law had read it, and given it the thumbs up. How it got to his place is unknown. No1 son?)

Opposite the title page of his dad's prize copy is a photograph of Pinney looking from a window in the Great Citadel of Aleppo, in Syria, a view that show a minaret, the large dome of a mosque, five smaller domes on the structure next to it, and the city in the distance. It looks dusty, and E@L bets it was.

~~~~~~~~~

Interestingly, the photograph of Pinney in the window has been reversed, presumably for symmetry's sake. The actual view from a vantage similar to that window is this:

~~~~~~~~~

Aleppo is having the crap bombed out of it during the current Syrian civil[sic] war. E@L thought the view might be different now, for obvious reasons so he did the G thing, (search "Aleppo bombing" - there's no need for E@L to show them here). He saw photos of destroyed houses, dead babies, men screaming, rubble on the streets from smashed houses, terrified children running, massive bursts of earth, fire, and stone from bombs caught at the instant of exploding, grieving fathers holding their dead children on their laps, blood-stained cobbled streets, burnt-out vehicles, exhausted refugees squatting with stacks of their belongings at the side of the road. Humans in the midst of a modern tragedy, the weapons of mass and individual destruction built and supplied by our countries of course. Horrifying, heart-breaking, unnecessary, and completely avoidable. We are a fucked species.

~~~~~~~~

Anyway, he found this:

Wondering if this is indeed the same mosque - those smaller domes smashed, the minaret luckily intact - and thinking he should read that book is

E@L

Surrender

I picked this book up recently in Kinokuniya, the second book about war refugees I bought that day.

The Girl With The White Flag

I just tried to start reading it tonight but I haven't been able able to get past the cover without sobbing like a, well I would say child, but here is this seven year old Japanese girl, separated from her family during the American storming of Okinawa...

From what I gather from the cover blurb, she had to survive alone on the island, to hide out from the battling troops during the invasion, and here she is on the cover, having made such a momentous decision on her own - my god what thoughts were in her head - to make and carry a white flag of surrender over her shoulder... Don't shoot me just because I am Japanese. I'm just a child.

She makes a mockery of our privileged lives.

Oh the things we warring adults do to children, the resilience of these children, the growing up they do in the heart-beats between bombs and bullets...

What's is going on in Syria, Africa, everywhere?

~~~~~~~~

I'm still crying. I don't think I can stop until wars stop.

I have no idea if the book is any good, or indeed if it justifies these emotions, but does it matter?

E@L

Disquiet

I wasn't sure what to do, or whether I was hungry or thirsty, sad or happy. I was tired from walking the streets of Lisbon on a warm, unpleasantly sunny day, for I had lost my hat in the train from Sintra and the fragile skin on my bare skull was broiling steadily. The crowd in the Museu de Cerveja looked to be straight off that floating city in port. I looked at the empty chairs in the place next door, older, hardly gentrified yet. Perfectly indicative of the struggle of Portugal to move slowly forward. So I finally settled on a table and chair that were the least unattractive to me, except that the table was unsteady after all, and I looked down at the restaurant menu, by the corner of the square. I turned the meagre menu (fish, more fish, fish) this way and that, but the food seemed to offer nothing but nausea and a repulsive end-product. I glanced at a sign on the wall. It was a line drawing of a thin-faced man with a moustache and those round glasses of old Europeans, and below this paltry representation were a few lines of self-deprecrating poetry. How he must feel on the wall. Like a fly, only unable to crawl, or indeed, to fly. Fernando Pessoa.

I opened my Kindle in a mood of resignation, for although I was unsatisfied with everything, I also felt the need to make a gesture, hopefully one that would take me away from my gloomy thoughts. Let me run my retinae over this array of pixels. Let someone else put the vibrations in my brain. I tossed the menu aside made the waiter (who had been hovering, and then had eventually moved away after observing my sour uncertainty and inability to commit) bring me a maio de liete and a quejada de villa francecso de campo, for that perfect cake would ruin my mood even further when I considered that it would not only not be fresh (flown in from the Azores who knows when) but my last one ever.

I read several pages of my book...


I had forgotten - it was uncanny, yet coincidences rarely excites me. I was reading The Book of Disquiet at that time. Short pieces, almost epigrams, paragraphs, a few pages. Everyone one of them ironic, bitter and dissatisfied, yet it was amazing - uplifting at the same time. It is so sad and negative, it is immensely enjoyable. The phrases are poems, not a cliche touches the paper for him.

And so my poor (transcribed above) blackness of the world lifted from my shoulders and a much BETTER blackness of the world settled instead. A black joy. Pessoa's perennial mood. I was elated at his contrariness and the refusal to enjoy life in evidence. Fernando Pessoa told me exactly and with unparalleled clarity how I felt, at that exact time. The word for my mood was "disquiet".

In short, with The Book Of Disquiet is perfect for those times when you are sitting in the restaurant where Pessoa himself used to sit and write (as he got drunk), and you feel happy to be feeling grumpy, which is 90% of the time for me, so I'm rating it 5 stars!

And I gave the waiter a 50c tip for his surly service!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Goodreads Review. No-one has liked it yet. I am expecting a lot of crap to be brought down on me.

E@L

Back to Black (Benjamin)

I am doing VERY poorly on my Goodreads promise of three books a month - I keep jumping from book to book halfway through and never seem to finish one. Perhaps because I keep buying more of the fuckers, and faster than any human can read.

~~~~~

I was in Folio Books in Brisbane last week (Archives Rare Books secondhand store was earlier in the week, no Oakley Hall in the Westerns section, damn) and, while I was buying the new biography of Stefan Zweig, I saw the latest Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) on the shelf, with a picture of Gabriel Byrne on the cover, dressed up in period costume almost as he was in the movie Miller's Crossing. Obviously they (who? BBC One and RTÉ One) have started placing the shambling Dublin pathologist, Dr Quirke, into a TV series! But I realised when I looked inside the cover that I was several books behind. I thought, hey, I won't buy it now anyway because bought-too-many-books-already/overweight-luggage/double-stacked-shelves/too-small-apartment (Ha, say my friends).

Back in Singers I go to check the last of the dour Quirke sagas I have read, the fourth - A Death in Summer. There it is, correctly sited in Fiction, alphabetical Author, publishing date order... with a bookmark poking forlornly out the top between pages 220 and 221. One third through. I didn't finish it. Oh, well there are a plethora (veritable, literal, actual) of other unfinished dusty* old tomes here, no great surprise there. I was no doubt enchantedly distracted by fresh pastures of augmented literary verdancy then as I still succumb to now.

I decided to restart it on the spot, catch up to the latest in the series and then download, ahem, purchase the TV shows.

~~~~~~

Straight away, just a few pages in, I knew why I had not finished it. It was not that I had been distracted by something else. I think instead I had consciously decided not to finish it. I didn't enjoy it, it was too light (despite the grisly death) for what I was expecting from the early books. Too much sunshine, or something (not even sure if it mentions sunshine, but...). I'd given up on it. When the author is named Black, you expect darkness. Perhaps the women are too beautiful, too photogenic, and that is where the sunshine comes from. But Quirke in love with that snooty-French bitch, the gorgeous, newly widowed (Femme Fatale alert) Francoise? You've got to be joking.

Sigh. Well... The plot also seemed (and still seems) terribly formulaic, something of a pastiche, a parody, an Agatha Christie-like passionless, vaguely intriguing mystery to read on the train. It seems to steal something from every other crime mystery ever written. Oh no, it's not suicide after all! The usual suspects; the rival blustery businessman fresh from verbal with the deceased; the surly, estranged daughter; the sensitive ex-con estate manager; the ice-hearted widow due for the inheritance; the businessman's mysterious son just back from (shades of Inspector Hound) Canada... This feeling was so strong, I recall I could almost see Banville/Black surrendering to a How To Write A Crime Mystery Writer's Workshop rigidity. The mindset that forces him to use hoary old tricks to keep us reading on past the chapter breaks. Perhaps they're not so much a cliff on which to hang, as a street gutter outside a pub to stumble over, but I hate that type of overly dramatic pause with a finishing sentence that doesn't finish anything. I might just be me, I despise airport (or train journey) thrillers because of it. It's an hiatus that clangs of ad-breaks for the TV shows (ironically), so that you can rush to the toilet... I fight against it. I prefer closure to the Perils of Pauline while I hold my piss. I much prefer watching cable-TV shows or movies that are edited to be watched all the way through, rather than to the fifteen minute ad-cycle of free-to-air TV I am forced to sit through with the FLOs in Australia. And it is the same with books.

Meanwhile other novels I have dug my head into lately (and not finished either, mostly) include ones by Thomas Bernhard, Jose Saramago, and Låszlo Krasznahorkai, writers who confront you with great slabs of un-paragraphed text for many, many pages, and even in Bernhard's case a whole novel, and when so the break does come, it comes not with a short gasp of suspense, but with a sigh of completeness. That's that part of the story done, OK? Now let me tell you the next bit...

Well yes, this ad-break method is inherent in the style of the genre Black/Banville's chosen to write, that of the unputdownable (take it to the loo with you) thriller, but it makes you wonder why he is just following someone else's sclerotic old rules half-heartedly, only half-seriously when he is such a master. He still writes as well as you'd expect of a Booker winning author (maybe Noble Prize short-listed?) and has sent me to dictionary.com now and then ("louring turrets" - louring: lowering, looming, threatening, as in dark storm clouds louring. As in turrets. A very Thomas Hardy word, don't you think?), and I think back on the masterly works of Banville as Banville, how Kepler captivated me, etc...

The title of the book itself:A Death In Summer**, it reeks of a TV show, doesn't it? Mid-summer. Murder. Sort of thing. From the start you know there's only going to be one corpse. There's a bit of mystery already gone. And it is not to be confused with the more Hemingwayesque title of William Trevor's Death In Summer. Death as a concept, as an abstraction, as a slaughterhouse. (Is Midsomer Murders about a serial killer?)

B/B's going to have to do something special to get this penny dreadful plot to rise above a Dame Agatha level of two-dimensionality. The sad fact is those cliffhanger devices work best when the story is thrilling already, but the intrigue of whether Sinclair will bang Quirke's daughter or not hardly moves me to insomnia. (Of course he will. Or maybe not.)

Having said all that, we know and love the man with more troubles than all the other crime mystery heroes combined, the multi-troubled, diffident but determined, the grown man still tormented by memories of a childhood in those horrific Irish orphanages, the poorly-reformed alcoholic, chain-smoking, overly curious Dr Quirke, surely enough.

~~~~~~

- Is it himself in this one?
- Aye, it surely is.
- And is he worth the flamin' effort? Just for himself, the man, at all?
- Aye, to be sure.

~~~~

Ah well, I keep pushing on... There's sure bound to be more about child-abusing priests, and the stories of other victims of the horror orphanages who had made it out even more negatively affected than did Dr Quirke. And Sinclair will bonk Phoebe. Or if not, definitely in the next book - I can wait to find out.

I'm sure blacker things will lour up suitably turret-like and ominous once I push past last time's point of abandonment. Then I can get on with rest of them.


E@L


* NTS: must berate the FDW for insufficient "attention to detail". (The catch-phrase of my old Chief Radiographer, who'd sweep every horizontal surface of your monthly allocated x-ray room for any particles of germ carrying dust: "Attention to detail, Mr E@L, is the hallmark of the good radiographer." As it is for almost every occupation, E@L kept muttering under his breath.)

** I wrote this before I read the much, much better informed and more forgiving Guardian review - I see cliché, he sees homage and due respect. The reviewer seems at least to have finished it before putting fingertips to keyboard.

Six Sentences

1. When Michel Faber was writing his most recent, and last he says, novel, his wife was dying.

2. Writing is a solitary career: you have be alone and uninterrupted to write, he told the interviewer from Guardian Books.

3. You can't write a novel and yet be physically with the woman you love, even while she is incrementally dying in the next room and you know your days together are limited.

4. But she wanted him to keep on and to finish writing the novel, because she loved him too and knew that he needed to finish writing it, perhaps because it was a novel about love and separation, coincidentally.

5. She offered him a compromise: That he write six sentences day.

6. This he did, and he finished the novel before she died.

The Book Of Strange New Things

(paraphrased by) E@L


[I couldn't quite place his accent - is it Australian? I had always thought him Scottish, perhaps because of Under The Skin. Turns out he was born in Holland, went to school in Australia, where no doubt that soft, ESL, accent was developed, and now he lives in Scotland. All these countries claim him as their own.]

Gone

The thoughts have flown, as they always do, 'twixt shower and computer, and I seem to be at a loss for what it was I thought so urgently a few minutes ago, under the aquatic flux, needed to be said.

It was important, deep, worthy of writing in stone. It has instead been drained in water.

~~~~~~

It was, I vaguely recall, on the loss of the muse. A frequently expounded theme.

I was looking for something back in old posts and couldn't find it - perhaps it was on the previous, pre-Blogger, no-longer-visible (some PHP parsing change has completely fucked it) E@L blog. But this allowed me to wallow in some nostalgia with the 800 odd posts still available here on Blogger.

Fuck, I was funny. Even when people didn't think I was, I was: I knew that jokes were nevertheless hidden in there. Jokes only I cared about, only I got, because they were so personal and obscure. I don't even have that anymore.

I can't do that anymore.

I can't even sit down and write properly anymore: instead I wallow in this disgusting and unreadable self pity.

~~~~~~

Hey! Great bottle of way-overpriced wine at Gaucho's, the generally overpriced Argentinian restaurant in BKK. (Makes my Woolloomoolloo places in HK and Singapore look ... about the same). Torbreck's Woodcutters - their easy, early drinking Shiraz. I normally take a bottle of The Standish, but this tasted superb after a coupla months of my eschewing of red-wine (mostly, Monday didn't count) as it gives me all sorts of unmentionable intestinal issues (never trust a fart!). Beware the next coupla days.

~~~~~~

Now I am still a little pissed and aware of my failings.

How about you?

~~~~~~

But I did a review for Goodreads. No wonder I am feeling melancholy.

~~~~~~

The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl by Italo Svevo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Ah. Ah. The characteristic mild mix of pathos, ironic humour and profundity that permeates all of Svevo's work.

An old man (about my age) falls in... love? lust? with a beautiful young woman as she drives her trolley (what we in Melbourne might call a tram) in Trieste at the start of the Great War. Well, we've all been there (I certainly have), falling in love, I mean, with a lovely, clean (she bathes once a day) young woman, inappropriately. She comes around to see (euphemism) him at his insistence a few times, and he gives her some money, but he decides to slow it down for it seems his conscience is troubling him. Then he has a severe angina attack (we've all been there - I certainly have) which makes him reflect on both his mortality and then further on the morality of what they have been doing.

He decides to write something to instruct her (as well as continue to send her money) - but this turns into a larger work on the morality of the responsibilities of age. What does youth owe to old age, and how should old people instruct young people; those who, although they are incapable of understanding this, will become old and near death one day themselves? As his heart keeps giving out (not a metaphor) he tries to prepare this treatise for publication, hoping that it will explain the moral dilemma he faces to the world, but his doctor, who listens to his arguments, is not impressed...

What is to become of this quandary, what will his treatise achieve? As he admits on his last written pages: Nothing, nothing, nothing.

~~~

This is stylistically not his best work by a considerable margin, the story doesn't flow quite perfectly, but Svevo nevertheless skewers the guilt and regret of men as they age, as he did so remarkably in Zeno's Conscience and particularly As A Man Grows Older. And I am currently experiencing it.

The term "tragico-comic" could have created just for Svevo. Or for me.



View all my reviews

~~~~~~

Yeah. Sad old man.

E@L

I Can And Do Choose My Books By Their Covers.

If you go book browsing and see something you like but there are several different editions, do you take the cheapest one, or do you go for the more exotic and colourful one that will add colour, size and general variety to your bookshelves?

For example: Wes Anderson's new movie...

... has a dedication at the end to the writings of Stefan Zweig. Zweig is one of those early to mid 20th century writers who have been rediscovered of late (late 10 years or so) and make you wonder how many other exceptional writers are out there, their stars dimmed only by time and the lack of making it to school reading lists, who deserve to be cherished and read for all time but are lost in the seemingly exponentially growing flood of newer books and the screaming white noise of the best-sellers. As a Stanislaw Lem character pointed out in His Master's Voice "Today, in the flood of garbage, valuable publications must go under, because it is easier to find one worthwhile book among ten worthless than a thousand among a million."

Wes Anderson has no hesitation in admitting his indebtedness in this interview in the The Telegraph. Very impressed.

Several of the smaller presses (twee hipsters?) have done a sterling, sterling I say, job of bringing a lot of these literary needles out of the, um, literary haystacks, and thence to my jaded attention at last. They seem to have been publishing his English translation since the mid-noughties. Also Penguin have had an edition of his novella Chess out since only 2006 - which I read a few years ago as it was referenced in some other book about chess somewhere.

So there I am in Kinokuniya Singapore, killing time while a cheap leather worker fixes my expensive but friable Timberland belt, and having seen the movie last weekend, and having been perked up at the end of this pushing at an overdose of twee movie when that "Based On The Writings Of Stefan Zweig" dedication at the very end came up (my friend noted a change in my attitude) and I thought, Respect!, and therefore I had to grab another/all of his books then and there to read on next week's trip to Australia ("work" - am expecting maybe 6 hours face-time with customers over four days.)

But which editions to buy? There was a New York Review of Books copy of Journeys To The Past, but I had the NYRB copy of The Post Office Girl in my bag. NYRB books all look the same - a rectangle just above middle of the front, plain colour spine, fonts always the same. Cute when you only have a few spread here and there, but they are starting to create their own bloc European in my library, particularly in the Russian section (Victor Serge [unread], Andre Platinov [reading], Vasily Grossman [unread], Yuri Olesha [read]). Reminds me of the fields of Penguin orange that once were triumphant across the shelves when I was a beginner bibliophile.

So instead I chose two collections of his short stories/novellae from Pushkin Press (who have comprehensive list of alternative/forgotten/ignored geniuses as well): Letter from An Unknown Woman and Amok because the covers rock!

Cute, different, uncool, awesome, heh? Bound, as it were, to be great.

It's no quite the same as using the jockey's colours to bet on horses, but it's fun and breaks up the monotony.

E@L

Diary Of A Drought Year

In my sister's garden shed last week my son found several nylon bags of my books. They just have been there for 10 years or so. The bags had degraded and other stuff had been tossed on top - fibreglass insulation batts (thankfully not asbestos), cushions, ceiling fittings, a lawn-mower....
Rain had obviously seeped in underneath on the filthy concrete slab and so many - very many - of the books were destroyed by mould and insects.

The pile of to be discarded mush included several first editions and some otherwise collectible editions. I asked him to just throw out whatever books were beyond repair and only keep those that had survived the trauma in an OK condition as to be able to be placed back on shelves, and those which had been only minimally damaged but seemed important or precious stuff - he knew what I meant. One of the items he found in the shed was this once black notebook (lower two pictures), and he thought it worth a look from me.

~~~~~

~~~~~

Just to make it clearer, we are cleaning out my sister's house and yard during her divorce - I am buying the place, partly to help her out and partly as an investment and partly as I have no base in Australia. As Mum's house is soon going to be sold, I can't continue to have my "c/o" mail sent there. So we had been clearing out that house as well, therefore my sister's place was doubled up with stuff - we are all hoarders too which doesn't provide my help... Long story - will save it for another series of blog posts.

So I opened the note-book (and I think from the look in my son's eye as I did so he might have already perused it) and I found five, seven pages (my hands are now dusty after putting it away and I don't want to extract it from the plastic bag again to confirm the count) of my usual left-handed scrawl. What had I been writing about? And when was this?

The year was 1983. We were four of five years into a long period of El Nino induced drought in Australia. Water usage restrictions were harsh. No watering during the day. All our lawns were dead. You couldn't use a dish-washer (not that we had one) and washing machines were frowned upon. Trees were falling apart, falling over, brittle and withered. We lost a lovely old peach tree (good Darwin the fruit had been luscious, but they only ripened on the branches over the garage roof.) Large bushfires had been ripping though the country. Nat was six at the time, and so I was 26. My wife and I were saving money to go to Europe. It was to be our final fling as a married couple, or so we thought. She was working as a Nursing Aide (the role doesn't exist anymore, nurses have to do it all the shitty stuff themselves these days) and I was working part-time doing holiday relief. I wanted to write something, some stories and god the attempts were awful - pretentious and ignorant.

I think I had bought a book about journal-keeping as I would have been skipping through Anais Nin's diaries at the time I think. What great idea. You're a writer young man. Writer's write. Rather than continue to fail to think something up, write about what you think, what's happening. Don't think of any audience, or think of yourself as the only reader. This is memory jogger, but a confession as well. Do it which ever way you want. Letters. Q&A. Whatever. Just write.

~~~~~

So now, more than 30 years later, rather than write anything new, I type this (relatively) juvenile drivel up instead. I haven't changed anything. These are real names: Patrick White, for example.

~~~~~
~~~~~

Journal Of My Thoughts Diary Of A Drought Year

I am unsure of who I am, if I have a genuine personality - something more than a series of characterisations to suit particular audiences. Who (I groan inwardly as I write this, it sounds so dumb) am I?

Am I that very intelligent person which Gerald and Mrs Sheriff say I am? Gerald when he wants to cut me down, Mrs S. when she tries to egg me on to write something?

Am I the stummble-tounged fool who can't make a simple comment about the weather without a grammatical faux-pas, a malapropism.

Am I the scared and lazy lover, reluctant to start sex, fearing rejection? No, not that. Fearing acceptance. Yes. Why so?

~~~~~

I: Sex, why do I fear you?

S: You are cautious, but it is merely that you are once-bitten.

I: Twice shy. Why can't I respond willingly when Chris is horny? Why can't I be eager without faking?

S: You can.

I: Occasionally. Rarely.

S: You don't like to hurt people.

I: Yes Chris is almost always disappointed. Don't laugh. If I try and try, she gets bored, she says "Don't touch my boobs tonight, just fuck me." What's the use, I can't please her, she's too fickle. I'd rather sleep.

S: Or masturbate.

I: "Sexual intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation," says Quentin Crisp.

S: You quote a homosexual's philosophy, are you homosexual?

I: I... I... I don't think so. What do you think?

S: You have an eclectic eros which is perfectly natural: You are part female, part male, both in the same body, in the same mind.

I: … [?]

~~~~~~~~

Who am I?

Am I the forgetful and lazy student? (Lazy twice already.)

Who Am I? A list.

Role - [neg] +[pos]

radiographer: - indifferent, helpful
writer: - untried, aspiring
husband: - inadequate, patient
father: - uncertain, learning to care
intellectual: - laughable, not much competition
music lover: - behind, eclectic
musician: - failing, flashes of skill
driver: - careless, lucky


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SU 27-2-83
I am disgusted with the weather.- it refuses to give rain in any useful quantities. This morning at 5:00am I was at work, feeling dirty and sweaty due I suppose to being up at such an ungodly hour, and I said to one of the nurses: "I wish it would rain."

"You and a thousand others. What' so special about you?" she asked.

"My soul," I said, "is desiccated. not only my liver."

~~~~~~

TU 8-3-83

Came home with a one-legged taxi-driver, his money-pouch hanging in the place where his thigh should emerge. It is raining a bit, but limply, and there is no wind. The air is like marmalade. Sweat oozes at any slight exertion.

Passport has arrived. Mine only. The others should come tomorrow, soon.

Saw Karen Burkett at work. She has just come back for a year and a bit in Europe. Worked in England, travelled a bit: Ireland, Majorca, Turkey, Jugoslavia, etc…

Last night waiting for the bus I saw Mark Bell. He is just home from sailing around the Pacific and Australia (I think).

It seems like the auguries are coming thick and fast - go to Europe, got to Asia, go go GO.

If I could just get clear of this Australia: it's just bullshit. I need money though. I would feel secure if I had $15,000 before we left.

Karen said she was burgled twice in Dublin - car broken into… bad omen?

I have been thinking of Dublin, boisterous, dirty, dear Dublin. Would like to see it - pubs, etc… Soon enough, soon enough.

Q: Why did I say Australia was bullshit?

A: I am ever wary of nationalism - this is a small planet - and it is getting a bit feverish here lately. Buttons, pins, T-shirts, bumper-stickers, are appearing everywhere - buy Australian goods to support Australia. I am wary of that too. Witness a bit in the Age a while ago where a student told that his 'work experience' consisted of replacing "Made In Korea" stickers with "Made In Australia" stickers. Hmmm. Just who are we professing to support!?

This country is not so hot for the liberal-mindind really.We couldn't get a motivated political group like the "Greens in Deutschland. We haven't got a socialist press. We can't even get good books. All the major magazines are unashamedly anti-left, pro-royalist, they campaign for the nauseous [sic] causes and the 1 ½ million housewives believe it because they can't get contradicting ideas into their homes let alone in not their skulls

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21-6-83

After several months of slog I have finished 'The Vivisector.' [1st Edition. Common as muck in Australia. Can't confirm that it survived, but I think it was in a different place. Am hopeful.]

White demands time - commitment - both of which are in short supply. I burnt through the last 100 pages in a day and naturally my mind was reeling with the images of Duffield and particularly his paintings, so much that when I went to bed I found myself dreaming about them. When Christine came to bed I was asleep but she brought [me] about ¼ out of sleep so that I was only vaguely aware of her and my body. She lay on top of me, and I was dreaming we were in the paintings - abstract and surreal - entwined yet dismembered - mostly indigo blue - very dark and angular, with a Cuttbush [?] moonlight. My cock was hard and burrowing into her belly as I turned and she rolled across, but it was a long mast, and she a billowing canvas, painted in black against an indigo dream night and Sydney Harbour sparkling with semen. We were the two lovers in the park - the fleshy rocks - distorted, half absent or more than half - and particularly on the left was a darker patch - but a bright triangle as if light from a streetlamp in a bayside park illuminated things obliquely. I was the park, the tree, the light, the moon, the ground and still the lovers - through I can't remember if the fucked - perhaps not. This odd sensation of dreaming yet being partly aware of your body is a dislocating experience, It felt strange but nice, though I wish Duffeild's paintings were more cheerful.

Speaking of dreaming, Cindy told me a dream she has last week in in which her father (estranged is, I believe, the expression [step-father anyway]) had died and her brother had to identify the body. Next day [awake] she visits her mum who says causally, "Your father died last night. P**** (brother) had to identify the body."…….

Is there a God? I ask myself.

Superluminal communication. Happens to selected people. I told Cindy she is probably an alien awaiting fulfilment - a la Doris Lessing [her Shikasta series] - when the New Age begins. Joseph [another friend] is probably one as well, as he seems so in tune with the cosmos… must explain this one day - now I must defecate. ---

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A young E@L