Fush

Barra n chips, tartar sauce, something called seafood sauce (which I declined) and 7 UP.  A guilty treat.  Not every week.

It just gets worse and worse

First we had the suicidal strategy of politically assassinating the elected Prime Minister in the full view of television cameras, leaving his body to stalk the halls of Parliament like Banquo's ghost.  Then there's the retreat from key policy areas ... one described as "the great moral challenge of our time."  You simply walk away?  Then comes "real Julia".

Had no one ever heard of the smart arse observation that when you're a hole the first act in getting yourself out is to stop digging?  Obviously not.

So, on election night, when the scale of the defeat is becoming clear; the majority is gone; the first-preference votes are mounting up for the conservative grouping and you're fighting (poorly) for your political survival how could anyone think it's safe to step up to the microphone and on live television and say (as Julia Gillard said) ... “It now appears clear that Labor has won the two-party vote. That means the majority of Australians who voted yesterday prefer a Labor government. I think this is a critical fact to weigh in the coming days.”?

Isn't there a basic rule?  Don't pose a question unless you're certain of the answer.  Don't assert any "critical fact" unless you're surer than "it now appears ..."  Appearances can be deceptive Julia.  And what do you do or say now that your hostage to fortune comes back to haunt you?

From today's Australian ...

THE Coalition has now leapt forward in the two-party-preferred vote, taking over from Labor with a lead of 1531 votes on the Australian Electoral Commission’s latest count.

Behind in the seat count.  Behind in the first preference vote count.  And now (maybe) behind on the two-party preferred count.  Where do you go now ALP?

Nincompoops!
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Call That A Plan?

Nothing spares us -
not the fiction of contentment
in these 'middle' years (too near
the end we dare not call the winter
of our discontentment)
nor the lightly held delusion
there is time enough, still waiting
in the finite but unknowable
days, months, years, decades
ahead (we hope) the time beyond.
Beyond what, I wonder?
The silences speak volumes.
The absences become companionship,
familiar like old friends
who need not say one word
to make their meaning crystal clear.
This is the future, as foretold
by the Beatle who broke up the band
or, as Spock once said, it's life Jim 
but not as we know it.
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SCA Open Day

We spent a large chunk of our Saturday at the annual open day at Sydney College of the Arts.  Spike had roles to play ... guiding prospective students around the glass studio giving helpful talk, lamp working exhibition beneath Mark Eliot's animated film showing on a continuous loop, assisting a little in the hot shop.  I spent most of my time perched on the edge of the hot shop watching staff and students blow various pieces.  It's a fascinating process.  Each piece begins with a single lump of molten glass gathered from a pool in a furnace on a pole.  From that point onwards I am lost.  Usually working as the creative driver in a team of two the glass artist blows, turns, adds more glass, clips, pulls, spins and swings the molten material.  Somewhere between forty minutes and an hour and a half later the initial idea inside the artist's head appears in as near its final form as it will ever be.  No two pieces are the same.  The process has a hypnotic quality.  You wouldn't want to leave until you've satisfied yourself of how it all comes out.

The vegetarian lasagne for lunch left quite a lot to be desired.  Heat was one of them. 

Cecked out the ravens.  Still there.
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Val Vallis Poetry Award 2010

I didn't win.  I don't know who did but the announcement was made this evening at the opening of the Queensland Poetry Festival.  I wasn't invited to attend so I think we can assume that Penelope Awakes did not come first.

Keep writing Douglas; keep submitting.
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Like the hole in the ozone layer ...

But still the dominant feature of one's life!!  I can't transfer, can't drive, can't dress or undress.  Patience may be a virtue but I am over this, truly had enough of it and it's no consolation that this is the first such incident in 26 years of being in the 'chair.
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Nam Le: The Boat

I finished the prize-winning collection of short stories by Nam Le.  My jury is still out.  There's no doubting the technical skill of the writer.  So why do I feel a nagging doubt emotionally?  Have I written before that the collection brings to mind the quote I like of words by Charles Rennie McIntosh?  "There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist."

Too many of the stories are devoid of an emotional core.  They feel (to me) like expertly crafted writer's workshop projects; hollow, technical examinations of prose style using ideas generated (borrowed from) some other, more authentic source.  So, Cartagena  takes its inspiration from the movie City of God and it just never feels like the voice of a young, Colombian gang member (but it is well written).  Meeting Elise (the weakest story in the collection) feels like a second tier Mirimax movie from the 1990s; one that never lived up to its Oscar-material aspirations.  You can see the joins in Hiroshima: the flash of the camera then the flash of the bomb.  Tehran Calling simply disintegrates in the final two pages and I'm not really sure that I buy the idea of the American woman visiting her former best friend but it is an ambitious attempt to occupy an entirely other persona.  Halflead Bay works well, although its premise is slight.  But perhaps, like Raymond Carver's stories, it's the ordinariness of a tale occupied by almost real people that gives the story legs.

The opening piece, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is described as "magnificent" on The Boat web site.  Sorry, it's not.  I need to get over my instinctual reaction against metafiction because I was deeply suspicious of the story the first time I read it.  Save me (I thought) from a writer's workshop project about a writer's workshop participant struggling to find authenticity in his writing whilst working out his relationship with his father and to his past.  But if you can get beyond those limitations (which are real barriers, suppressing more interesting and potentially engaging writing on similar themes) the story bears a second reading.  Beyond the metafiction there is an authentic voice, I think.

The final story, The Boat, works best for me.  The fate of the boy is discernible from the outset but that's not a problem.  There is an emotional risk at the centre of the story for its characters.  It's the way we're taken to the heart of that risk, see it exposed and witness the truth of its consequences that makes such an impression.  It seems to me that there's no flashy posing in this story.  It is what it is, told expertly and with an internal consistency and force that far outstrips the other stories.

I may be too harsh with these criticisms.  For any writer's first collection of published short stories The Boat is an impressive, highly readable group.  It augers well for the future.  If this is what Nam Le can give us first time out, we can look forward (I hope) to some remarkable work in the future when he's acquired the confidence to abandon the showy front and simply tell us authentic tales of his own imagining.
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