Tales from Underground

Both Doug MacLeod and Scot Gardner have published books dealing with death recently, so they had an interesting combined session at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival talking about death and the dark side. I was really keen to attend this session even though I haven't actually read anything by either of these two chaps-yet. I have been stockpiling Scot Gardner's books for some time. I heard about him many years ago and expect that I will like his work, even though I haven't actually read any of it. I've decided that about other authors too, most notably Paula Fox and Will Self.

Doug MacLeod has a background in TV comedy writing and indeed, is a funny, funny man. He doesn't believe in life after death as such, and he would like to believe in ghosts but doesn't. Doug has a dark sense of humour, which he ascribed to his father being ill with cancer while he was a teenager, and that black humour helped through a difficult time, something I certainly understand. 

Doug did a wonderful reading from The Life of a Teenage Bodynsatcher (a CBCA Honour Book for Older Readers in 2011). He described the mother as a steal from Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell, unburdened by reality, and under the effect of laudanum. It was hysterical. 

Scot Gardner is not obsessed by death, but his most recent book, The Dead I Know, winner of the CBCA 2012 Book of the Year for Older Readers, is about a "goth kid working in a funeral parlour". Scot's godparents run a funeral parlour, so he had easy access to work experience. Scot based his central character on an African war survivor who had lost his entire family, and he had marveled at that young man's resilience. 

He spoke about the experience of death and grieving. That death is guaranteed for all of us. That it can be a lovely thing when it's the full stop at the end to a long and joyful life. Scot felt that there was more elegance in the way people are dealt with in a funeral home than fiction allows. 

Scot also read from his book. And he also showed an extraordinary slideshow about the death of a rather large cow called Tiny on his family property. It was wonderful.

Wondrous Words Wednesday 5/9/12

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.  

I often come up against new words whilst reading the newspaper. This first one is from a SMH review of Dave Egger's latest A Hologram for the King. 

1. Ludic (Adjective)

The struggle pays off in A Hologram for the King, which rejects the ludic ostentation of Heartbreaking Work and embraces the elegant restraint and limpid observation of Zeitoun to create a novel- part elegy, part black farce-written for a United States that's beginning to realise it on the wrong side of history. 

Of or relating to playfulness. From French ludique and Latin ludus. The Free Dictionary. 

The rest of this weeks words come from Sonya Hartnett's Life in Ten Houses.

2. Clowder (Noun)

The cats befriend a clowder of ferals, and the novel featured six major feline characters, most of them modelled on real-life cats I'd owned in the past. 

A group of cats. Also cludder, clutter, kendle, kindle. The Free Dictionary.  

Picture source

3. Fag end (Noun)

The northern end of Burke Road, however, was and remains Kew's fag end, its hangnail.

An end of poorer quality, or in a spoiled condition, as the coarser end of a web of cloth, the untwisted end of a rope, etc. The Free Dictionary.

4. Mingy (Adjective)

After Clifton Hill's hard surfaces and mingy spaces, the wilderness of the train line and the messy sprawl of the property's garden seemed exactly what I needed. 

i) Small in quantity; meager.

ii) Mean and stingy. The Free Dictionary. 

Melbourne Writers Festival Top 10

Dymocks had the bookshop for the Melbourne Writers Festival. They appeared to be doing a thriving business. Which is great of course. They had a display at the front of the shop where they had books for the authors doing the signings, and an interesting festival top ten.

Intriguing to watch it change each day, and see who was selling. Predictable to see Simon Callow, Gillian Mears and James Boyce there.

But it looks like Andy Griffiths was the big winner. Certainly his signing queues were huge, bursting out of the Atrium.

Melbourne Writers Festival Opening Night

I've already done a few posts about the Melbourne Writers Festival, but it all kicked off with this one. Opening night. Always a big night. Melbourne Town Hall. 

It's always packed.

I've been to Opening Night before, another corker, Clive James back in 2007! Five years is too long between festivals. Opening Night the excitement is palpable, we're at the front end of 350 events, and they've sold 60,000 festival tickets.

The Age Book of the Year Awards are announced at opening night. The Age Book of the Year for 2012, and the Non-Fiction Book of the Year is James Boyce's 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. The Fiction winner Gillian Mears' Foal's Bread. Poetry winner Mal McKimmie's The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems. James Boyce looked well chuffed and completely surprised by his big win.

Simon Callow hit the stage and the room was held spellbound. He's a magnificent orator. He spoke, without notes, in his extraordinary fashion for about an hour. Yes he knows his topic of Dickens inside and out, and I'm sure he could rattle this off on any given day. I'd seen Simon Callow's production of The Mystery of Charles Dickens 10 years ago in Sydney, so most of the material wasn't new to me, but it's still wondrous to be in the same room with such a presence. And we had fabulous seats in the front row!

Simon spoke of his introduction to Dickens as a 7 year old boy seeing a production of A Christmas Carol that scared the hell out of him. Later at 13 when afflicted with chicken pox "a medieval torture of an illness", he was in misery until his grandmother placed The Pickwick Papers in his hands. He was immediately immersed in Dickens world- huge, larger than life characters, an England that he immediately recognised. He began reading his books one after the other. And has never stopped.

Simon Callow was here this night largely to talk about Dickens and the theatre, given his new book Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. He described Dickens' public readings as a "unique and staggering theatrical experience". He had an extraordinary ear for accents, and created voice after voice, he would hardly move from the lectern. He often rewrote the texts for his public readings, or wrote new texts. He knew that his work came to life when read aloud, and Callow tells us that this sense of theatre was absolutely inherent in his work.

Queen Victoria herself was a great fan of his readings, as were the British public, who felt that Dickens spoke for them. Simon Callow believes that it was the exertions of his public readings that killed Dickens. On his final tour he had a swollen left foot, he was on crutches and could hardly walk. He finally met Queen Victoria whom he had "sedulously avoided" until that time.

Dickens forbade any statue to be erected in his honour, and to this day there is no statue of him in Britain. There's one in Sydney, but none in Britain. He wanted his books to be his monuments. I really must read them. I've only ever finished A Christmas Carol, and still say that Bleak House is the best book that I've half read twice.

If you weren't lucky enough to be at Melbourne Writers Festival, you can share in the experience with Books and Arts Daily on our Radio National who are sharing In Conversation with Simon Callow on their website, and you can listen to this wonderful man. I hope this link works internationally, but don't know if it does.

What Reading Means to Me

What Reading Means to me was the beguiling title of a session that I attended at Melbourne Writers Festival this week. A great panel with Cassandra Golds, Andrew McGahan and John Boyne. This was another session in the schools program and the vast majority of the audience were school groups and their teachers, although some older ladies seemed to be there because the tickets were $7, still they enjoyed it too I think.

The moderator said that she had asked the panelists to think about three questions. What do writers read? Do the books they read when they were young still matter? And do you need to be a reader to be a writer?

Cassandra Golds spoke of her 6 year old self hearing a recording of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, and crying, the first time a work of art had made her cry. She knew from that young age that she wanted to be a children's author! At 9 she discovered Narnia, and discovered the possibility of another level of reality. At 11 or 12 years old she was most moved by The Stone Cage by Nicholas Stuart Gray, and described it as funny, magical and moving, a fantasy story with a fully developed psychology. I hadn't heard of this book before, but it does sound intriguing, being a retelling of Rapunzel from a cat's point of view.

Andrew McGahan described growing up as a rather bookish child on the family farm in Western Queensland. The house had a large library, and he had easy access to a rich storehouse of stories. He first loved horror and ghost stories like many boys, and then entered the world of fantasy via Tolkien and Stephen Donaldson.

However he came to realise that these were all European or North American settings, that none of the books he was reading were set in Australia, and none had any relevance to the flat farming land of the outback that he saw each day. He then read Patricia Wrightson's work, particularly The Ice is Coming and found it quite altering. Here were books set in Australia, drawing on Aboriginal mythology, with creatures that fitted the landscape that he knew.

Andrew McGahan has only recently become a children's author, his first work for a younger audience, The Coming of the Whirlpool, was only released recently. He made his name as an adult author and perhaps his most famous and lauded book, The White Earth, he described as having been written entirely in Patricia Wrightson mode.

John Boyne grew up in Dublin, and described his joy at the half school day on Wednesdays. Not just that it was a half day, but he would go to the library that day and carefully select the books that he would read that week. As a young boy he loved Bobby Brewster and Noddy books. He discovered the world of Narnia at 9 years old while recuperating from an appendicectomy. At 12 he was reading Dickens, preferring the works with child protagonists- David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickelby. Indeed he rereads David Copperfield to this day.

He cited A Monster Calls as one of the best books of the last few years. So many people do, I really must read it. He felt that there was very little rubbish published in the YA world, and I must agree.

They each talked about their writing selves too. Naturally, each of them felt that you needed to read to become a writer. Cassandra Golds felt that her reading had given her her voice. That each of her books was a response to all the books that she's loved, and a response to things that have happened to her. John Boyne described fellow Irish author Joseph O'Connor (Sinead's brother) as having written out Hemingway as a young writer to learn how to construct sentences and dialogue. John Boyne always carries a notebook to jot down ideas, while Andrew McGahan encouraged daydreaming. There'll be no time for daydreaming with the multiple books that have just been stacked on top of my already tottering TBR.

Ashfield Park

I've known that there was a statue of Mary Poppins in Ashfield Park (in Sydney) for quite a while. I'd walked through the park several times in a half hearted effort to find it. A friend lives nearby so I was there reasonably often. Now my friend is moving, it's unlikely I'll visit all that often, so one day recently I went on a quest to finally find her.

Seems not only Paris has a pigeon problem

I'd walked most of the park (it's quite big), then realised where she had to be. Near the children's playground. And, there she was!

On duty for ever, watching over the children

I also found some of the local family of kookaburras. One of my favourite birds, they are always a delight to see, whether they're laughing or not. 

They typically perch up in trees on the lookout for  lunch

Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae)

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

Napoleon Exhibition NGV

The National Gallery of Victoria has a blockbuster Napoleon exhibition on until October 7 2012. An extraordinary collection of artworks and artifacts about Napoleon, his first wife Josephine, their lives and their enthusiasm for Australia!

The publicity for this exhibition has been huge. Ads in the weekend supplements each and every week. My Melbourne friends all seemed to have been, some multiple times. Resident Judge went. The Intrepid Reader went. Everyone loves it. So, I was expecting to like the Napoleon exhibition, and I was excited to find time today to go. Naturally, I wasn't disappointed. It's an astonishing exhibition. Well worth going, and the audio tour adds much to the experience for the patient and inclined.

Napoleon (the exhibition) gives us a chronological walk through the tumultuous times of late 18th and early 19th century France, and Australia. We start off in the court of Louis XVI, famously married to Austrian princess Marie Antoinette. We see a lock of Louis's hair, gorgeous paintings of the couple. Then terrible paintings of the revolution, the horrific prisons, the execution platforms. Particularly moving is Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat, an extraordinary painting I hadn't seen before, and a simple revolutionary pike used to parade guillotined heads about the streets of Paris, next to a portrait of a friend of Marie Antoinette who met such a ghastly fate. Her head was paraded in front of Marie Antoinette to show her what had happened and as a prelude to her own gruesome death.

La Perouse is not a famous name to most Australians perhaps, although he is still marked by a suburb in Sydney, but it's absolutely fascinating to learn about his journey to Australia at the very founding of British settlement in 1788. La Perouse arrived the same week as the First Fleet in January 1788. He spent six weeks in Botany Bay, before sailing off to the Solomon Islands, where he and his crews all perished in a shipwreck. Louis XVI didn't know of his fate of course, and all the while when he was incarcerated after the French Revolution of July 1789, it is said that he asked each morning if there was any news of Monsieur de la Perouse. Even on the morning of his execution, having been visited by his family for the last time the night before he asked about Monsieur de la Perouse. I found that particularly moving.

We then come across a bright young military student from Corsica. Napoleon and Josephine were both not French by birth, and apparently spoke French that was quite heavily accented. Napoleon rose up through the ranks of the army, fighting famous battles in Egypt, and in Europe, crossing the Alps into Italy to fight the Austrian army, which gives us Jacques-Louis David's heroic portrait of Napoleon, used to promote the exhibition. Apparently Napoleon in reality crossed the Alps on a more sure-footed mule rather than the robust white stallion pawing the air, but it makes a much better picture doesn't it?

Extraordinary to see a dress worn at Napoleon's coronation on December 2 1804 at Notre Dame in Paris, normally held in a private collection. Jacques-Louis David's massive painting to mark the occasion is my favourite painting in the Louvre. It dominates a room in the Large French Paintings section. I love standing before it, dwarfed, in awe of the opulence and majesty of the scene. I have the fridge magnet version on my fridge door at home and gaze at it every day. How wonderful then to hear the astonishing music played at the coronation? Sadly not available on CD, I asked. Two massed choirs, it was sumptuous and gorgeous. Almost worth going back, just to hear it again. I wasn't aware that Napoleon was said to have crowned himself, upsetting the pontiff awaiting the task. Indeed there is a sketch by David of just such a scene, although it is not the version portrayed in the official portrait. And fascinating to learn of the use of bees, on Napoleon's robes and throughout the cathedral, symbolising immortality and resurrection. The whole coronation and beyond was of course more typical of the monarchy that had been abolished with so much bloodshed and violence in 1789.

And the Australian connection? Absolutely fascinating to see maps displayed with Southern Australia labelled as Terre Napoleon. We could have been French! Napoleon and Josephine were both quite fascinated with Australia. Josephine pursued specimens of Australian flora and fauna for her private residence at Malmaison (naturally a new destination has been added to the French wishlist). Kangaroos, emus and black swans graced these most French of gardens, amongst other exotic species. Black swans were said to be her favourite. Indeed Empress Josephine is reported to be the first person to breed black swans in captivity! Sadly she also aided the extinction of two species of emus.

Even after his death Napoleon may have contributed to Australia. Napoleon was initially buried in St Helena, buried in a field under willow trees. It is thought that visitors to his grave may have taken willow cuttings enroute to Australia and so perhaps the willows I see out of my kitchen window have their origins at Napoleon's burial place in St Helena? I hope so. I shall choose to believe that they do.