Every Australian Counts

After breakfast at Bondi

How hard can life be?

Some numbers drive me nuts

Take 84 as an example.  I picked up my short essay on Defoe's Roxana from a tray outside my tutor's office this afternoon.  84%.  I ask you, what's that all about?

My mark is one point below a High Distinction grade.  One point.  I'd much rather receive a lower mark - the high-seventies or low-eighties maybe - because the mark would be clear.  Dougie, it would say to me, middling sort of effort.  Must try significantly better.  84 though?  That one point is within a margin of error that has nothing to do with careful assessment.  It's a message - not quite good enough for a High Distinction but very close, almost there, treat this as sign of encouragement, missed it be a whisper.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Good.  Got that of my chest.

Opening Night

The artist and her parents at Hatched.

Little Willy's

Breakfast's nearly done - omelette and chai - in a neat little cafe on William Street, Northbridge - a student, cafe, culture neighbourhood on the northern side of the CBD.  There must be a million cafes like this one the world over; small, re-conditioned and re-painted wooden tables of a variety of shapes and sizes, some retro booths (as we might be in the American fifties maybe), benches made out of three milk crates and half an old plank of wood.  There's an Indie band playing n what I'm sure will be an ipod driven player.  i've no idea who the band is but the upbeat, slightly knowing observations of the songs imbue the cafe with a relaxed, friendly atmosphere.  A young woman with orange hair, a pink jacket and her de rigeur iphone sits in front of the window, next to the pavement from where one can see and may be seen. People come and go for takeaway coffees.  They're mostly regulars who smile, their vices singing with the days news or the latest instalment of a story commenced yesterday, last week or a year ago.  The guys behind the counter seem not to miss a beat; brew the coffee, put a slice of cake in brown paper bag, listen to the story, ask questions, comment on how difficult / fun / cool / much of a relief to hear that on had to let go a new member of staff who just didn't get what we're trying to do with retail or another spoke of the causes of this morning's hangover, a third talked about honeymooning in  Paris and the fourth's cat turned up.  I could linger all day.

Waiting for the AV guys

The show opens on Friday.  Spike's work is in boxes waiting for the AV guys to fix a problem with projection.  At least the plinth is unwrapped!!! But there's time.  So, it having been a very long day with an early 5-hour flight from Sydney we're going back to the hotel for a sleep before tonight's meal with Spike's mum and dad.  

Voice

Spike had an interesting seminar at the Art College today, considering 'voice' in writing.  Her tutor had referred the class to a questioning article / sceptical review from The New Yorker (2004) written by Louis Menand.  Spike and her class mates were asked to "bring to class an example (no more than two paragraphs) of some writing (any genre) where you think the writer's voice is strong."  Spike selected the first page of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.  Good choice.  If it had been me going to class, I'd have taken Prufrock.  No more constructed voice in literature. 

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

You mean ... out loud?

William Makepeace Thackery

Any person passing-by the silent room in which a score of bright but bored students of English literature sat today between four and five o'clock in the John Woolley Building of the University of Sydney might have wondered if the ghastly horror of an enormous, noisy fart had just ripped through the air inside, rendering all members of the class speechless, mortified lest their colleagues or the tutor might put the blame on them.  But no, the silence was not born of guilt or knowledge of the guilty farter in the midst of such unspeakable agony.  All that had occurred is that the pleasant, if inexperienced, tutor, sitting at the teacher's spot in front of the whiteboard, the sole occupant of the fourth wall of our makeshift group shelter, had asked that someone in the group read a short passage from Vanity Fair before we started to discuss what it might tell us of the author's interests, style, themes, purposes ... who knows what?  Eyes dropped to stare at the floor.  A few reluctant students shuffled in their seats, feigning purposeful activity such as turning the page of a notebook, losing one's place in the text, breaking the tip of a pencil.  Silence ruled while the great fart of engagement toured the desks in the forlorn hope that one of the assembled number might confess to an interest, a willingness, a liking even, for the act of reading from one of the greatest satirical novels ever penned in what was, when all's said and done, a university level course in English literature focusing on, of all unlikely things, the novel in English.

Interloper that I was, taking the class because I'll be in Perth on Friday when my usual tutorial is scheduled, I felt that one of the regulars might want to fill the gap.  But no, it appeared not.  Unfortunately I was unable to assist.  Pretending to myself that I'm a modern reader I'd equipped myself with a Kindle version of the text on my ASUS Transformer.  As the gods of anti-modernity would have it though my Tablet had died earlier in the day.  That's an overstatement because Spike resuscitated the computer when I got home. So, unable to bear the painful silence I apologised for being without text, recounted briefly the sad tale of my defunct tablet and was on the point of asking the bored young women next to me if I could borrow her pristine, possibly unread, copy.  Another young woman then interjected.  She would read.  I'm not quite sure if her threshold for pain at the awkwardness of our collective reluctance was close to mine or, perhaps, she felt sorry for the nice old man at the other side of the room who had suffered a not uncommon IT problem.  Either way, she read.  Between us ... her, the tutor and me ... we got a conversation going but it was hard.

I admit to puzzlement.  We're students of English, aren't we?  Who among us ... language barriers aside ... would not want to read out loud in the presence of such bright thinkers?  I'm NOT taking the piss.  It seems I'm a bit odd in this regard.  I'll try not to let that stop me.

There's Vanity Fair ...

... and there's the movie from 2004 starring Reece Witherspoon.  Each is enjoyable in its own way but the latter is a pretty distant cousin of the former.  But there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon when you're not going far from home; not going anywhere come to think of it.

Good student

From go to whoa: nine hours and 2,300 words later I have finished what looks like the virtually complete draft of an essay on chapter 26 of L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy for my university course on Postmodernism.  It'll do.  It has to cos we're leaving for Perth on Wednesday.  I can't remember the last time I had a student essay ready to submit six days before the deadline.  I'll put it in the box on Monday.

Here's the start:

Chapter twenty-six of LA Confidential is a microcosm of James Ellroy’s thematic interests as a writer of period fiction whose sometimes shocking autobiographical details[1] have driven the author to reject and re-construct the 20^th Century genre of ‘hard boiled’ detective thriller as part of a personal, literary and social pursuit of sometimes appalling underlying truths (as he perceives them).

[He] is one of the most significant historical novelists writing today.  His novels … describe 1950s Los Angeles and 1960s America through the eyes of ‘bad men doing bad things in the name of authority’.  If he departs significantly from what academic historians would consider acceptable practice, it is because he has a different, though equally rigorous and committed, approach to his material.[2]

Chapter twenty-six fuses the known social history of 1950s Los Angeles with Ellroy’s darker, imagined, conspiratorial and close to paranoid version to expose hidden truths about the corruption, exploitation and male violence that Ellroy sees at the heart of 20^th Century America. 

---

[1] Reinhard Jud (Director): James Ellroy Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction (Fischer Film GmBH, Vienna 1998) access at this location http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YPHNCDxQgk on 14/04/12.  (All subsequent references are to this edition.)

[2] Jonathan Walker: ‘James Ellroy as Historical Novelist’ in History Workshop Journal Issue 53, page 181  (All subsequent references are to this edition.)

... not necessarily wiser.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

Good question

What should one make of Ellroy?

He said of himself:

… I give the period novel a much more explicit thrust … and since this was a time where not everything was discussed ad nauseam, well it has a paradoxical power. I want to leave all of you with the weird, strange, ugly, pervasive sense of bad juju ramifications extending beyond the last pages of my books.  I don’t want to ever give you a type of book where the good guy wins and the bad guy loses on the last page or even where the bad guy wins and the good guy loses.  I want you to feel it going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on …

James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction

And Andrew Pepper wrote ...

In the light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, attempts by LAPD officers to nominate a deviant blackness as the root cause of criminal activities and societal problems ring hollow.  Instead what Ellroy’s LA Quartet illuminates is the constructed nature of whiteness, its parasitic dependency on blackness or a blackness represented as morally monstrous.  Strategies of domination implicit in the crime fiction of, say, Raymond Chandler, strategies that manifest themselves, for example, in Marlowe’s fear of the contaminating racial other, are made explicit in the revisionist grotesqueries of Ellroy’s fiction.  Yet by making these strategies explicit, by intensifying the racist rhetoric of his various white-cop protagonists almost to the point of parody, Ellroy shatters any pretence that what he is representing is somehow invisible or natural.  The distorting influence of social power is omnipresent in the often overblown rhetoric of his protagonists and cut free from its secure moorings, whiteness becomes a free-floating signifier, a Janus-like, schizophrenic figure whose efforts to convince as a beacon of civility are undercut by an ill-conceived propensity for barbarism and a neo-colonial desire to control or even annihilate dissenting voices. 

The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class 

(Edinburgh University Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 2000)

I worry that in Ellroy's worlds there is no one who is not tainted.  I fear he makes a fetish out of homophobia, misogyny, racism.  I understand that ghastly, appalling events occur perpetrated by sociopaths and psychopaths.  But there is decency too and ultimately, I believe, it is triumphant.

I'm not sure where that leaves me with the essay I have to submit next Tuesday.

One hand clapping

Wheezing like a tired, old dog
spreadeagled on a threadbare, faded rug
in an empty room on the ground floor
of a shack, two-miles out of town
on a long-forgotten, seldom travelled track

a man, no longer sure of why
or even when he came to sit and stare,
turns his slightly heavy head a fraction,
maybe less than that - to listen -
to try to hear once more that sound

he thought he might have heard before;
not an echo, not a whisper,
not the distant drum of some lost drummer
marching down the road to might have been
but still, he thought, the sound of something.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I watched the 2011 movie version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy at home this evening.  It's very good, perhaps good enough to watch several times to catch all the tiny nuances.  The performances are uniformly excellent; Gary Oldman is sensational.

The director's view of the seventies seems to be brown, with the possible exception of the decorations at office Christmas party, Anne Smiley's dress and blood.  Maybe there's a symbolism there.  Maybe not.  But what a drab, horrible universe the film-makers created for us with virtually everything of the human spirit sucked out of living.  Can the Seventies have been that soul-destroying?  Maybe.  After all the decade ended with Thatcher's election victory.

Following a Google trail at the end of the movie I was sad to learn that the co-writer, Bridget O'Connor died before the movie was released.  She was 49 years old, clearly hugely talented.

Double Bill

Good Friday in Sydney is quiet; offices shut, shopping malls closed (in the case of the Broadway Westfield, padlocked - of all the old-fashioned technologies to use - at one entrance), light traffic on the roads and comparatively easy parking.  Spike had an afternoon's work at the Glass Artist's Gallery in Glebe so I went to Hoyts adjacent to the padlocked shopping mall.  I arrived just in time for Wrath of the Titans 3D to be the only option that didn't require me to wait an hour in the lobby so I paid my money and entered the cinema with a bottle of water, bag of crisps and a pair of 3D specs that might have fitted a teenager.

What can I say?  WOTT is less tedious than COTT.  It takes itself far less seriously so the light smattering of humour worked well enough.  It is silliness on a stick, of course.  But that's not necessarily a bad status to aim for, so long as there is fun along the way.  There wasn't quite enough fun for my tastes while there was way, way too much hand-held camera, in the thick of the action cliche that's well past its sell-by date.  There is a bit of me thinks that if you're going to enter the territory of the epic tale with gods, demi-gods and heroes on winged horses you have to commit yourself totally: step through the magical portal, suspend our disbelief and step back, impress us with the magnitude, epic qualities of an epic tale.   Close up and personal doesn't quite cut the mustard.  All the same, I've seen worse.  And it seemed mercifully short, which was just as well.

I was back in the foyer by 2:20, close to four hours still to go so I searched Glee Books (without success) for a copy of LA Confidential then returned to Hoyts.  My second choice was John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was sweet (but mercifully not too sweet), gently funny, genuinely poignant at points and not too heavily laden with the lessons and wisdom we may acquire with age.  The cream of British acting talent of a certain age performed impeccably - I could watch Tom Wilkinson in anything (he is truly great at understatement, which makes his rare outburst of passion always more thrilling) and Judi Dench was, well ... Judi Dench.  Maggie Smith, simply flawless (even though her narrative journey was implausible to the point of being fanciful).  Dev Patel gave a truly engaging performance, perhaps the standout of the piece (given those he was in the mix with).  He's clearly been learning his craft since Slumdog shot him to fame.

I was particularly amused at the coincidence of my choices that put the irrepressible Bill Nighy in both movies as the barking mad, brilliant and brave Haphaestus in WOTT and the hapless Douglas in TBEMH.  He was terrific value in both, possibly the best thing about WOTT and triumphant in a worm that turned kind of way in TBEMH.  Either way, worth his weight in gold.

All in all, an enjoyable Friday afternoon followed by cocktails and nibbles (rather more than that to be fair) at the excellent, friendly The Little Guy in Glebe Point Road.

Just write

William Wordsworth was 28 and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 26 when Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems was published in 1798.  It may be true that it is never too late to try but I'm already older than their years combined.

Ice on Ben Arthur, 1971

Bring back the way we might have been
with our half-remembered brightness
like those eager men the world had not yet seen

restless in pursuit, not of their greatness
but of truths that they or we or any mountaineer
might look for in the glint of winter's sun

skating on the frosted summit's skin
above us; out of reach and yet so near
we dare not cease until the climb is done.

Assignment one done

I've written 866 words on my close reading of a passage from Defoe's Roxana.  It'll have to suffice although it's 116 words more than requested.  Ho hum.

I received a cheque in the post today from The University of Sydney.  It's my $140 prize linked to the Margaret Cramp award for a part time student in English.  That's the second time I've won.  I previously thought that there must be very few members of the eligible cohort but according to the Federal Government's new web site, My University, more than 40 per cent of the students in the School of Letters and Media study part time.  So maybe there were two of us in the running.

I'll take it in honour of Miss Cramp of whom it was written, you will recall, she danced in blue taffeta.

Daniel Defoe and my Close Reading Epiphany

I am struck again by how little I know or (being generous to myself perhaps) ow much I have forgotten because some of what I mention here I was taught at school.  That was not yesterday.

Our first assignment for the 'Novel Worlds' unit at Sydney University is due on Thursday.  It's a close reading exercise (a form of literary criticism to which I respond badly - foolish and unreasonable as my reaction no doubt is).  I have 750 words to produce on a passage from page 278 of the World's Classics edition of Daniel Defoe's final novel, known as Roxana  or The Fortunate Mistress although its original title was The Fortunate Mistress : Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess of Wintelsheim, in Germany, Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charless II.

The passage is perhaps the most important scene in the novel.  We're on a moored ship at the moment Roxana meets her abandoned daughter, Susan (named after her mother).  Susan suspects that the woman she knows as the Lady Roxana may be her natural mother.  It's a moment of crises for Roxana.  During the passage her identity collapses entirely.  

I read that collapsed identity into the text.  I surmise that it's there, see that it fits with the structure of the narrative.  But at my usual level of reading I'm guessing (intelligently but guessing all the same).  At that level of analysis, however, my exercise flounders.  I would have struggled to find 750 words of any type, let alone meaningful analysis.  

In an act of desperation I thought, start with the "I".  that's how the passage begins.  So I counted them up.  There are thirty-one.  I circled them with a lime-green highlighter and lo and behold a picture emerged that began to reveal the evidence in the text I needed to support my superficial reading  Defoe has Roxana refer to herself with the subjective pronoun "I" thirty one times in two and a half paragraphs.  When she says (to her 'Relator') "I was to conceal myself" in the middle of the third paragraph she stops using the subjective pronoun and switches to the objective pronoun "me".  Defoe has the character of Susan, Roxana's daughter, make the opposite journey grammatically.  For the first two and a half paragraphs Roxana only uses the objective pronoun (her) for her daughter.  But at the point at which Roxana describes herself with the objective pronoun she starts to use that subjective pronoun, she, to refer to her daughter.

From subjective to objective pronoun and vice versa.  The collapse of subjectivity and identity of the mother coincides with the emergence of the long-abandoned daughter as subject.  Who would have thought I'd end up here, analysis of grammar; nothing more than a structuralist.

Don't get me started on Defoe and the personal adjective!!