August

In August 2009 this blog was born. I was reading The Ask and the Answer.

On this day in 2010 I was singing along to Darren Hanlon's latest (at the time) album.

Around this time in 2011 I was reading Yellowcake and enjoying some MWF sunshine.

In 2012 I  was being brief (though excited) about books, and keen to hear The Futureheads' acapella album, RANT.

August last year... who knows, really... But I had been to see Joan Baez (has it really been a year?!) and was soon to muse on the cost of books.

Skipping to the present day...

AUGUST 2014

Four months (almost to the day) after being retrenched from my in-house editor job, I am cheerfully living the #rockstarfreelancelifestyle, editing picture books for Little Hare and proofreading whatever comes my way.

I have also returned to my original career as a children's bookseller! I like to think of it as working at the coal face. Excitingly, this includes visiting local primary schools...

And there's time to read.

The protag has already eaten at least one "simple meal".

I loved it. In spite of this cynical review.

Some pop-lit-psych as an entree to understanding literacy.

And the end of August is bringing SPRING to Melbourne. It's (starting to be) T-shirt Weather!

opening lines

I love a great opening line.

You know these classics, but here are the first sentences (sometimes first two) of the books currently on my to-read (or recently read) pile:

I said a silent prayer.
Actually, silent is probably the only type of prayer a guy should attempt when his head's in a toilet.

– Winger, Andrew Smith

Tommy was a talker and didn't much like the other ghosts, so he was forever talking to Kelpie.

– Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier

 'I think Bill is in love with Mrs Peck,' I confide to an undersized blue swimmer crab that has become all tangled up in my line.

– The Minnow, Diana Sweeney

The ring is small and space is tight, and their circles feel like flying.

– The One and Only Jack Chant, Rosie Borella

The first thing we had to do was catch the Tralfamosaur.

– The Eye of Zoltar, Jasper Fforde

It happened before Jack was born.
When Amrei was six, a spider appeared on her shoulder.

– No Stars to Wish On, Zana Fraillon

The first thing is the smell of blood and coffee.

– Why We Took the Car, Wolfgang Herrndorf

The ground is hard and dry. The dirt yields grudgingly as the gravedigger thrusts his shovel in.

– The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, Clare Wright

 And how about this breath-taker:

It took slightly under eight hours for Melbourne to die.

– Pandora Jones: Admission, Barry Jonsberg

métro, boulot, dodo – no more!

Au déboulé garçon pointe ton numéro

Pour gagner ainsi le salaire

D’un morne jour utilitaire

Métro, boulot, bistro, mégots, dodo, zéro 

                                                 – Pierre Béarne

When you don't work the ole nine to five you can...

go to a bonfire & celebrate your freedom,

make some new plant friends,

go to dogsit at your parents' place for one night (but stay four) & you can throw the ball to the dog,

and throw the ball to the dog,

and throw the ball to the dog,

and throw the ball to the (other, less interested) dog,

you can go to a preview screening of The Fault in Our Stars & crying-headache hangover be damned,
get exciting new work that you can do from your house in your pjs,
stay up till the wee hours because you have a new story idea,
cycle down the street & get a fringe trim on a whim,
pick up a shift or two at a bookshop,
drink all the coffee,

and read. Of course.

away from home and back again

Heading Home

Pushing it to a hundred

flanked by paperbacks and pines.

Their branches tremble,

startled by the high-beam halo.

Velvet Underground

drowning out the engine.

Singing the choruses and

dipping lights for oncomers.

Mumbling the verses

and slowing to eighty

through Balnarring and Hastings.

heading for the city,

the freeway and the lights.

Leaving the winter coast

and the house without curtains

for another weekend.

 

- Adam Ford, Not Quite the Man for the Job (buy it here)

Reading this, I'm reminded of the song Animals by The Guild League, which begins:

Clouds of feathers fleece and foam,
halfway to my childhood home.
In the car and on my own,
white lines where the road is sewn.
Stitches holding down the car,
beside the sun under the stars.
Through the evening coloured so
like pink champagne and eye-shadow.

It's on their album Inner North (buy it here)

poem love #1

Having a Coke with You

Frank O’Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

visit the Frank O'Hara website here

2012 bests

lots of people are making their lists of 2012 best reads and if i made a list it would go on forever, so i've decided to go with just two: a YA best and one grown-up one. as it happens, one is the first book i read this year, the other is the last. this is a kind of symmetry i like. one was first published in australia in 2012, the other is from a couple of years ago, but which i only just got around to reading.

there were many amazing YA titles this year (and A LOT of australian ones), but i'm going with daniel handler's why we broke up, illustrated by maira kalman. i love these guys; loved their collaboration on the picture book 13 words. when i read this i was just about to start work at hardie grant egmont and it made me feel so chuffed that my new workplace had chosen to be the australian home for this book. it made me feel confident that we would get along.

why we broke up

min green and ed slaterton are breaking up, so min is writing ed a letter and giving him a box. inside the box is why they broke up. two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a folded note, a box of matches, a protractor, books, a toy truck, a pair of ugly earrings, a comb from a motel room, and every other item collected over the course of a giddy, intimate, heartbreaking relationship. item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.

beginning to end, all the angst and heartbreak included, this was a delight. all the (made-up) films and movie stars, the references that min made and which baffled ed. the conversations that went around and around, the tangents and segues. why we broke up is a brilliantly written and smart book - plus, so perfectly teenage. min is hyperbolic, feels things so deeply. she's over-dramatic (some might say) and i know there were many adult YA readers who didn't like this one at all. and this, above all, is why i love this book so: a teenager's life should often exclude or baffle an adult and i felt that min and ed and al all had the space to exist as teenagers and as people. they felt real, they spoke their thoughts and got things wrong. they were unlikable, precocious and whimiscal (angsty). and i loved them for it.

***

i don't read a lot of books for grown ups, and even more rarely do i read non-fiction. but i've been coveting patti smith's memoir just kids for a month or so now, drawing it out and savouring it. i finished it this morning; i loved it.

just kids

just kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to new york city during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. a true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

smith's prose is dreamy and yet straightforward, it's intimate but not self-exploitative. i knew so little about her life, and littler still about her relationship with robert mapplethorpe. this was such a special book. i loved the way she spoke about all those crazy cats who inhabited manhattan and brooklyn and paris in the 60s and 70s - it was just life, it never felt like she was name-dropping or big-noting. i appreciated the solemn, serious and dedicated way she approached her art. i think this is one i will read again and again.

yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. it had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. perhaps it was an awereness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. sometimes i just wanted to raise my hands and stop. but stop what? maybe just growing up. (p.104)

happy new year!

ffor the love of fforde

I would that you'd excuse me my absence. I'm on something of a reading binge. A re-reading binge. A Ffordian, Thursday Nextish re-reading binge. I began with the latest release, The Woman Who Died A Lot, and then had trouble recalling the rest of the series (I suspect a mindworm) and the rest is the last week of my reading history.

First Among Sequels not pictured, and One of our Thursdays is Missing is missing, but you can read a review here.

This series is just delightfful. And so clever. The idea is that Thursday Next is a Literary Detective with SpecOps. They police things like counterfeit Shakespeare plays, bootleg copies of Dickens and stolen manuscripts. But it's when Thursday realises that she has the ability to actually enter books and interact with the characters within that it really gets interesting. The world Fforde has built is bonkers: it's an alternative world where the Crimean War is still ongoing, Wales is a socialist republic, people travel by airship or these ace Gravitubes (UK to Australia in about 45 minutes or so), cheese is a rare commodity - sometimes smuggled illegally across borders - and, best of all, people prize books and literature above most things.

Wouldn't you love a tv series based on these books? I know I would. Kind of Doctor Who meets Lost in Austen with a dash of Life on Mars via your local bookshop.