Call me Ishmael?

Pic by Spike

It's been eight years or so since I was last on the water sailing a dinghy. James, my experienced buddy, told me that the essentials come back to you very quickly. He was right, although I'm very glad he was sitting next to me as we glided over the barely-ruffled surface of Lake Tuggeranong. At times we came almost to a complete standstill. Breezy, it was not. But it was enjoyable.

The ever-patient Spike sheltered in the shade of a tree from which vantage point this photo was taken. Next time we're both there it's possible we may sail together. Such is the bond of trust. Or the folly of ignorance.

A bird starts a bush fire

Mop-up work continues after fires in the Tarago area. Source: Canberra Times
Photo: Karleen Minney

Today's Canberra Times reports the assessment of the rural fire service that a low-flying bird, ignited by power lines north-east of the ACT set fire to the bone-dry land beneath it. The report tells us almost 3,400 hectares of grassland, woods and farming property were destroyed. Although livestock and wild animals were killed, one house and some vehicles destroyed, fortunately no one was hurt and no one died. Still. Summer heatwaves in a time of climate change and global warming are not done with us unless we take action.

Celebrate diversity

And don't let racists win.

A picture of two girls wearing hijabs was taken at a 2016 Australia Day event in Docklands. The photograph was used in a 2017 Australia Day billboard which included rolling images of people from different backgrounds. The billboard was removed after threats. Photograph: GAZi Photography/www.australiaday.vic.gov.au

Crowdfunding raises $50,000 for new Australia Day campaign with girls in hijabs. Read the story in the Guardian Online.

Daughters of the Dust by Rhiannon Hooson

Daughters of the Dust

There can be no mermaids of the steppe
though its bare hills roll and boom like the sea. Only
some strange creature, lithe in the gelid dust
and furred like a fox: silent, accusing in the eyes,
a deep wind parting fur down to bone coloured skin.
Horizons pile thin as paper one atop the next
and they spin their story into the pinched air: a woman,
and a wish, and a corsac fox. Nights

of the great white zud they might dance away the snow,
leaving paths of grass for the herd to eat, or else
rise like walls to blow across the landscape
stately and slow and sickening, only the chiming ice
singing their welcome with its spare high notes,
each like the prick of a needle. And in the city,
where the nights smell of sweet smoke and milk
and idling traffic, they go walking now:

silent over the glaze of blood frozen to the ground
around the wrestling palace. Silent in the alleys
where stray dogs sleep in the warmth from sewer grates.
Silent past the cafes where soldiers thaw their brows
over salt milk tea. Silent, until they are singing,
each alone in the dim reaches of the night,
each pale as an unlit candle, up through the gers
where the roads falter and the lights go out; up to the mountain
where the wind sings back; towering, and tidal, and old.

Read this poem today in The Guardian; their poem of the week. Love it. To be read out loud, 

I Am Not Your Negro

I'm looking forward to seeing this. 

I saw James Baldwin speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 1985. It was riveting, unforgettable with an electric atmosphere in the big tent. I went along with Martin Currie. It was four months after I was discharged from my ten months in hospital following my accident. I was still getting used to life in a wheelchair. Still am. 

Summer by Joy Williams

Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton

Finished the third short story in Joy Williams's collection, The Visiting Privilege. 'Summer' (first printed in The New Yorker in 1981) is delightful; chronicling the events and personalities during five weeks of an August summer holiday on an island somewhere off the eastern coast of the USA. It is warm, affectionate and humorous with less of the underlying melancholy present in the first two stories in the book (although that seam is not entirely absent). The children leap off the page as unique, wholly believable, perfectly-drawn individuals. The women who come in succession to stay on five consecutive weekends are brilliantly presented with such economy that it takes your breath away. Steven, the author boyfriend to each of the five women, is never seen but I formed a picture of him nonetheless, laughing out loud on the one occasion we hear his voice through a resolutely closed door. Constance and Ben feel real and you think ... maybe I mean hope ... their love will endure (because of the final paragraph) despite the frailty of the human body.  

The story has the feel of memoir. Maybe it is, partly. But maybe it's entirely constructed from the writer's imagination. More likely, I suppose, it's an amalgam of both because isn't that what all fiction is, in the end? I chuckled quietly as I read, sitting under shade in our garden on a hot summer's day here in Canberra. I am beginning to feel in awe of Joy Williams and there are still forty stories to read in this collection. How could it have taken me thirty-five years to catch up to this story? And longer than that to find my way to Joy Williams in the first instance. Fool that I am.

Three wax Aine waiting after Midnight

And we begin again ...

After Midnight. Happy (and hopeful) New Year to all. Pic by Spike Deane