Heidi- the Shirley Temple movie

Every Friday night we have a movie and pizza night as a family. It's a lovely tradition that we've been doing for a year or two. Of course it doesn't happen every week, but whenever we're all home it's on. This week was our first chance in ages, and it was my turn to pick. I'd been wanting to watch Heidi since I read the book earlier in the year. Tonight I had my chance, I passed up the endless stream of Dr Who, modern animated features and dinosaur movies that seem to fill our agenda, and picked Heidi.

I guess I had seen a Shirley Temple movie when I was a kid, but don't remember if I saw this particular one. It's astounding to realise that she made over 40 movies. This was certainly the first of her movies that I remember seeing as an adult. She was rather impossibly cute with those ringlets and dimples.

The quality of my DVD copy was rather poor, but it was still enjoyable. The movie followed the book reasonably closely on the whole. The major elements of the story are there at least. Heidi is taken to live with her grumpy, hermit grandfather who she has never met. They make a life in his simple, isolated Alpine cabin. I was actually hoping for more Alpine scenery. I'm not convinced that any of it was filmed in the Alps actually. Certainly we don't get to enjoy Heidi's idyllic time on the Alpine meadows with Peter and the goats as I hoped we would.

There is only really one song and dance sequence, this is slipped in as Grandfather is reading Heidi a story and she imagines herself dancing around as a little Dutch girl in wooden clogs. After the story moves to Frankfurt the plot diverges quite a bit from that of the book. It's all wrapped up at Christmas, a few months earlier than in the book. There must have been a fashion in the 1930s for horse carriage chases, as we have another one here, similar to the 1940 Pride and Prejudice.

Much to my surprise, after some initial grumblings from the boys about the lack of dinosaurs, aliens and disruptions to the space time continuum, we did all rather enjoy Heidi. Perhaps I'll try to slip some more old movies in to our schedule....

Wondrous Words Wednesday 12/10/11

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a fabulous weekly meme hosted by Bermuda Onion, where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our weekly reading.  

My words today come from Christos Tsiolkas' controversial Australian book The Slap. 

1. Solipsistic (Adjective)

Was art for the good of mankind or was art only good when it was elitist and solipsistic?

I know that I've looked this word up multiple times, for some reason it never sticks. Maybe this time. 

Solipsistic, refers to solipsism

i) The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.

ii) The theory of view that the self is the only reality. The Free Dictionary. 

2. Firmament (noun)

She drove in ten-hour stretches, seeing nothing but the burnt scrub and the infinite blue firmament, parking the car in isolated service stations and braving the freezing cold of that emptiness while she willed herself to sleep. 

The vault or expanse of the heavens; the sky. The Free Dictionary. 

The Australian firmament

3. Bricolage (noun)

He was the only one with balls enough to denounce the hopelessly outdated postmodern bricolage of the artist's work.

i) The jumbled effect produced by the close proximity of buildings from different periods and in different architectural styles. 

ii) The deliberate creation of such an effect in certain modern developments. The Free Dictionary. 

I noticed the beauty of the bricolage in Luxembourg last year- I just didn't know it had a name!

4. Catamites (noun)

Vasili Grigorovich D'Estaing, the legendary French Huguenot admiral who had defected to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, was infamous not only for being the bastard child of Ivan the Terrible, but also for his ribald behaviour: it was said that he had boasted of one hundred mistresses and a dozen or so boy catamites. 

(This is from a fictional account written by a teenage boy)

A boy who has a sexual relationship with a man. A boy kept for homosexual purposes. The Free Dictionary. 

All Sorts of Stupidity 4

As I was researching a bit to write my post on The Slap, I came across a news article that just left me astonished.

Radio National is a branch of our Australian national public broadcaster The ABC. I moved on from JJJ to Radio National quite a few years ago. JJJ is the youth broadcaster, and I listened to it longer than most I think. But it comes a time when you want more thought, more content and less indie rock. So you start listening to Radio National. And it's great!

So many fabulous programs. Radio National can make stuff that you're not really interested in, interesting. You can download most of it from their very good websites, and listen to it whenever it's convenient.  One of my great favourites is of course The Bookshow. Ramona Koval is fabulous. They explore a wide range of books and literature, big sellers and little known. You always learn something. Recently I listened to a story on the literary life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis while I was cooking one Saturday afternoon. I'd had no idea that she'd worked as a book editor. I'd had no idea that she'd worked actually. It was unexpectedly fascinating.

And now I find out that The Bookshow is under threat! RN are apparently planning to turn The Bookshow into an hour long books and arts show (up from the current 45 minutes), and claiming that this will increase the coverage of books! The Age has taken up the story. And The Australian. I haven't come across anything in The Herald as yet, which I presume is why I didn't know about this.

Thankfully Christos Tsiolkas has come out swinging. And I will too. Earlier this year I became old enough to write my first letter to the ABC. My second letter, well alright email, is under construction.  I hope yours is too. As the news reports have said of The Bookshow- everyone loves it just the way it is, and if it ain't broke- don't fix it!

Random photo of tulips in Launceston last month

The Slap

It's been quite a while since I read an adult book, and it's been a refreshing change. Even though this is quite an adult book. This was THE book of 2009. As perhaps the last person in Australia to read it, I finally succumbed to the pressure in the week leading up to the airing of the miniseries on TV. I naturally, wanted to watch it, but had to read the book first. Of course I'd left it so long that I was then forced to buy the TV tie-in copy instead of the proper cover. I hate that. I want to imagine the characters as I see them, not the actors playing it out on screen. And then I didn't finish in time to watch the first episode before I'd finished reading. Another quandry. In the end I decided to plow on and finish the book before I started with the mini-series. Interestingly this edition has three pages of "Praise for The Slap" at the front, and an extra two pages at the back. I don't know that it needs that for readership, but there it is.

This book literally was everywhere in 2009. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin (beaten by Tim Winton's Breath), and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. They talked about it on the First Tuesday Book Club. On the Bookshow on Radio National (where the reviewer wonders if Tsiolkas has mellowed as The Slap isn't nearly as raw and confrontational as his previous works! WOW. They must be something. This is a great 5 minute audio review actually). And it was lauded and discussed in just about every paper, magazine and on every scrap of paper. 

Still, even though it's been so talked about I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Yes, everyone knows by now I'm sure that it involves a child who is slapped by a man, not his father, at a backyard barbeque in suburban Melbourne during the later years of John Howard's Australia. It is however, much more than that. The actual slap is quite near the beginning of the book, and the book is more about the year following the slap. The events the slap unleashes and the strains it puts on the rather complex relationships between the characters. Cleverly told in 8 sections, each narrated by a different character who was present at the barbeque and involved in the narrative in various ways. 

There are of course many more than 8 characters, and initially I found the first chapter a bit confusing. Who was related to who, where everyone fitted in. Much like when the hordes descend at a real barbie I guess. This soon sorted itself out. Perhaps the most shocking thing is the insight into each character's head. As many have said, the vast majority of the characters are flawed, and well, particularly obnoxious and rather awful. I felt very uncomfortable being inside their thoughts. They are vulgar and profane on many levels. Is this really what it's like in other people's heads? I hope not, because it's very, very awful. 

Tsiolkas does broach many subjects as well as the debate about whether anyone has the right to slap an obnoxious, awful child. He takes on private vs public schooling, Australian drinking culture, marriage, fidelity, the mores of the modern world, the role of the media. He even taught me a slang racial epithet that I didn't know that was used to depict Australians! (Skip). There is tenderness. I found Manolis' section particularly moving. And humour too.

Connie looked alarmed at that option. "I don't know anything about hats."

"It's the sad decline of civilisation. What can I say? It's okay. I don't wear them either now that I'm a hippie."

One passage that really stood out for me was when the court case is held. She here is Rosie, the mother of the child who is slapped.

When they finally entered the courtroom she  had to stifle her disappointment at how unimpressive it was. A lone Australian coat of arms sat above the judge's seat and already a stain of weak, lemon coloured damp was rising in a corner of the room. They took seats near the front and waited for the case to be heard. 

The pettiness of people's lives, the mundane sadness of what people did, mostly for money, sometimes for love or out of boredom, but mostly for the desperate need for money, is what Rosie took away from that day. Young men- just boys really, but already with long, tedious prior convictions read out by equally young, bored coppers in hesitant monotonous tones- faced the dock for stealing toys, stealing radios, stealing iPods, stealing televisions, stealing handbags, stealing work tools, stealing food, stealing liquor. There were young mothers ripping off the dole, young girls shoplifting trinkets and mascara and DVDs and CDs and Barbie dolls for their kids. 

I'm glad that I finally read got around to reading The Slap. It's very uncomfortable reading for much of it, but does have a lot to say about how we live now (which I have just realised is Helen Garner's blurb on the front cover). I hadn't read any of Tsiolkas's work before, and perhaps this was a good place to start. . I'll be interested to read more of it. And  now I have television series to look forward to. If I could get near a screen this weekend, what with Dr Who finales then a Series 6 marathon, car racing and endless games of World Cup Rugby, then I could watch the first episode. 

Houston Topiary

I was very lucky and had a recent trip to Texas. A garden centre in Houston has a fabulous array of topiary creatures in the centre of the road outside the centre. I just loved them. 

Saturday Snapshot, is a wonderful weekly meme from at home with books.

The Black Stallion

First let me say how much I hate the cover of my copy. It's too much like an airbrushed velvet painting for my tastes. Sadly it was illustration free too. I wish I was able to read an earlier edition that presumably had the illustrations. Even if it is a tad dated, it has olde shoppe charm. And now I find a reprint of the 1941 edition is still available. Damnation. 

A famous book, and deservedly so. Walter Farley began writing The Black Stallion when he himself was still in high school. It was published when he was a 26 year old college student, and he had an instant hit on his hands. It has remained popular, and is still in print 70 years later! Farley went on to write 34 books in total, including 21 Black Stallion titles.

The Black Stallion begins in India. An American school boy, Alec Ramsay, has just spent the summer in India with his missionary uncle. He travelled out with friends of his father, but is making his journey home alone. It's never specified just how old Alec is, but I think it's remarkable that the school boy is allowed to travel alone by ship for the better part of a month. Can you imagine parents letting their children do that these days? Not likely. We hover over them too much, worrying over the least detail of their lives. No helicopter parenting for young Alec. 

Every chapter is fairly short, 10-12 pages, and punchy. Something big happens in every chapter, just to keep the pages turning. The cover proclaims "Shipwrecked with a wild stallion!", but the shipwreck action is all over in the first 4 chapters! The major part of the story is the friendship, love and bond between Alec and the Black. (This is probably really stupid as an objection but I really didn't like it that the horse was simply referred to as "the Black". I found it weird that Alec never really named him.)

Still it's a rollicking tale, and quite the page turner. I really enjoyed it, even though my horsey phase is long over. It feels wholesome just reading it. 

Kid Konnection is a weekly childrens book feature at Booking Mama

Birds in the Botanic Gardens

Last week you saw the lovely flowers that caught my eye on a recent walk in my local Botanic Gardens-and which were much easier to photograph than these birds. Bird photography is HARD! Still it's fun to try and exciting when I accidentally get something in focus.

Eastern Spinebill- Acanthorhynchus tenuirostris

Yellow-faced Honeyeater- Lichenostomus chrysops

Eastern Rosella- Platycercus eximius

Juvenile Crimson Rosella- Platycercus elegans elegans

Eastern Rosella- Platycercus eximius

Eastern Rosella- Platycercus eximius

I kept a careful eye out for the Magpies, thankfully none were swooping this day

Australian Magpie- Gymnorhina tibicen

Red-browed Finch- Neochmia temporalis

Sometimes you just need to keep an eye out for the quieter types

Pacific Black Duck- Anas superciliosa

This pair were busy renovating a nest in this sawn off branch

Galah- Cacatua roseicapilla

Another pair busy preening

Galah- Cacatua roseicapilla

Saturday Snapshot, is a wonderful weekly meme from at home with books.