Perth

Intimate Strangers, Katharine Susannah Prichard

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

Intimate Strangers (1937) was the eighth of KSP’s 13 novels (9th of 14 if you count the serial in New Idea, A City Girl in Central Australia (1906)). KSP was a Communist, developing over time a firm commitment to Socialist Realism in her writing, which was in any case generally quite plain. Nathan Hobby, her biographer, says this became more marked after she visited Moscow in 1934.

In The Red Witch Nathan writes, “She quoted Gorky saying, ‘The simpler the language the better …’ It was a principle she adopted, moving away from the influences of DH Lawrence (Working Bullocks) and modernism (Intimate Strangers) and towards a plainer style in her late novels.” And in an essay he wrote for us at AWWC Nathan says, “[The Goldfields trilogy (1946, 48, 50)] is a decisive turn away from her experiment with modernist interiority in her novel of middle-class marriage, Intimate Strangers, drafted between 1929 and 1933 and published in 1937. “

While she was away on that 1934 trip, KSP’s husband Hugo Throssell, a returned serviceman suffering from ‘shell shock’, and by that time a failed businessman, shot himself, which KSP only discovered, in the newspapers, on her return to London from Moscow. It seems he may have read the ms for Intimate Strangers, which KSP had completed but left behind, and saw himself in the cuckolded husband. KSP’s original ending for this novel was pretty hard on the husband and Nathan writes that she changed it – spoilers prevent me from saying how – prior to publication.

The novel is the story of Elodie Blackwood, from whose point of view it unfolds, and her husband of 15 years, Greg. Elodie’s mother had been a concert pianist in whose path Elodie had been expected to follow, but she had given up any chance of an international career by becoming pregnant, becoming a wife and mother – of a son and a daughter. Their home is a cottage they are paying off, on the river foreshore at South Perth, looking across the water to the city. (And which we know, from the writing of TAG Hungerford, who grew up there, as an area of family homes, Chinese market gardens, and dairy cattle).

When the novel begins the family are holidaying at the beach, in the fictional suburb of ‘Calatta’. This puzzled me for a while (and Nathan too, he wrote a post about it in 2014); but I’m pretty clear now Prichard was thinking of the limestone and sand hills behind the beaches of Coogee and Woodman’s Point (map), south of Fremantle, where there are still some beach shacks along the foreshore.

I never did resolve though the line of islands in the distance, as there aren’t any; just Garden Is to the south, Rottnest out on the horizon, and Carac, a mudflat a few kms off the beach (which KSP mentions by name).

It suited Greg to be bronzed and insouciant, Elodie reflected. He looked ten years younger, hobnobbing with boys and girls on the jetty, along the sands, swimming, diving, doing physical jerks with them, chiaking them, and they him, in the free and easy, go-as-you-please life of the beaches at Calatta. How handsome and lovable he could be!

Greg, a returned serviceman from WWI, so approaching 40, has a crush on ‘Dirk’ Hartog, the most popular girl on the beach, and the best swimmer. She sees him as a friend, a relief from being constantly pursued. Elodie is happy for Greg to have a crush on some other woman, and there are a number over the six months or so covered by this book, it takes the pressure off her. Greg too sees no harm in it, “Other women might attract a man for a while, whirl him this way and that; but there was something about Elodie, an otherwhereness, that drew and held him”.

Dirk and her mother are the remnants of a fine family, still living in a fine house. I wonder if Prichard was thinking of Tukurua (pictured), on the beach further north, near derelict for a while but now being restored. Everyone meets there but Dirk knows one day she’ll have to marry money to save the house. Meanwhile her best friend is Tony, a boatman, Communist firebrand and son of Italian immigrants.

The core of the novel is that Jerome, a Hartog cousin, and owner of an inter-island trading vessel, comes to town, meets Elodie and determines that when he leaves she should go with him.

Summer fades to autumn, the Blackwoods return to South Perth. The Depression catches up with them; Greg loses his job as an accountant; makes a fool of himself with Dirk; gets taken up by a wealthy older woman, Trixie, accompanying her to the races and helping her with the interior of her new house. Elodie supports the family teaching piano and playing with a dance band.

Elodie spends more and more time with Jerome …

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Katharine Susannah Prichard, Intimate Strangers, first pub. Jonathon Cape, 1937. My edition from Untapped. 360pp.

see also:
Nathan Hobby’s review (here)
Other KSP posts:
Nathan Hobby, The Red Witch (review)
Ventured North by Train and Truck
Tarella down a Rabbit Hole
Child of the Hurricane (autobiography)
The Pioneers

Reading ‘Plans’

wadholloway Journal

Journal: 108

I’m not sure what’s going on with my reading life. I seem to have a whole heap of books on the go at once, and I’m remembering none of them – 37 hours of The Brothers Karamazov has come to an end (after 30 something hours of His Dark Materials) but still needs to be reviewed; meanwhile with actual books I have to make time to sit down and read, I have one more for the Le Guin prize, two for AusReading Month (Oct), and one for MARM (Nov) all part-way through; and then I also have to get read and reviewed this month one for AWWC and one for my 12 Books of Boyhood (or young manhood really, these last few).

For that last, I had this list of possibles – Brideshead of course I’ve just done – and I was struck by the publication dates. Given I was reading them in the years, say, 1967-72 they were even then mostly quite old

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, first pub. 1945
Jane Grant, Come Hither Nurse (1957)/Richard Gordon Doctor in the House (1952)
Leslie Charteris, Enter the Saint (1930)
Georges Simenon, Act of Passion (1946)
Robert Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil (1970)
William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (1959)
Joseph Heller, Catch 22 (1961)
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: the Left-Wing Alternative (1968)

I have more than a shelf of Saints, Maigrets and Simenons (along with my William books and PC Wrens), and who knows how often I read Come Hither Nurse and the Doctor books. I was hoping I could squeeze them in, but no luck

I Will Fear No Evil I read as a serial in a pulp SF magazine in the Union library at uni, which is why it is contemporary. I’m not a Heinlein fan, although I didn’t know that then, and the sexism in this is egregious, but it formed my introduction to mainline SF. I don’t have a copy or I might have been tempted to write a critique.

That leaves those last three to review in the three remaining months. The Naked Lunch because it was formative in my idea of what literature might be stretched to do; and the other two because they were so important politically.

I wrote in a comment somewhere that between work and family I have had very little time for blogging. A week or so ago I was just home from seven days away and Milly said she’d like to go down to see Gee and the kids; then I was offered a job way up north to Argyll Diamond Mine, which I knocked back because, you know, I haven’t been particularly brilliant at keeping family commitments in the past; then Milly was crook which put us back a day; and as soon as we were down there another job came up which I had to take; and the ute wouldn’t start; at 5.30 am; so we had to wake up son-in-law to give us a push; got back to Perth around lunchtime, picked up some clothes and food from my place, then dropped Milly (and dog) off without stopping the engine; got my truck from the mechanic; loaded, got going etc, etc, back Saturday; on which day Gee arrived at Milly’s (taking the older kids to see Mary Poppins, show, not movie); so more family – which is a good thing; Monday I had truck stuff to do and here we are Tuesday, accounts piling up, reviews piling up and I’ve already accepted a load for later in the week; so this is all you’ll get for a while.

When the interminable Bros K. finished I listened to Clarke by Holly Throsby, a middle of the road country town drama. I was liking the characters and generally enjoying the flow of the story when Throsby decided to resolve the central mystery by plonking down an enormous coincidence based on people on one side of a major incident not knowing the names of the people on the other side – entirely impossible in a country town (and going by her well known parents, I doubt Holly Throsby has ever been in a country town for more than a one night gig) – and I just switched it off mid-sentence. I’m still disappointed, days later.

I’ve been topping my Audible library up with Canadians recently so I had a break then started listening to Motorcycles & Sweetgrass. More Trickster magic. Come on, doesn’t Canada have a Marie Munkara.

Pic: Castledare Minature Railway – Met Gee and grandkids there, Sunday (so Milly could work).

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Recent audiobooks 

Fyodor Dostoevsky (M, Rus), The Brothers Karamazov (1879) Crime
Holly Throsby (F, Aus/NSW), Clarke (2022)
Yrsa Sigurdardottir (F, Ice), My Soul to Take (2009) Crime
Philip Pullman (M, Eng), His Dark Materials (1995) YA Fantasy
Drew Hayden Taylor (M, Can), Motorcycles & Sweetgrass (2010)

Currently Reading 

Zain Khalid (M, USA), Brother Alive (2022)
Eugen Bacon (F, Aus/Vic), Serengotti (2022)
Drusilla Modjeska (F, Aus/NSW), The Orchard (1994)
Margaret Atwood (F, Can), The Edible Woman (1969)
Evelyn Waugh (M, Eng), Brideshead Revisited (1945)

AWWC Sept 2023

DateContributorTitle
Fri 1Stories FTAAmy Mack, Her coup-de-theatre (short story)
Wed 6Elizabeth LhuedeThe ink-quester: Nancy Hogan
Fri 8Stories FTANancy Hogan, The parable of the mountain (poem)
Wed 13Teresa PittAgnes Murphy, One Woman’s Wisdom (review)
Fri 15Stories FTAAgnes Murphy, One woman’s wisdom (extract)
Wed 20Bill HollowayChristina Stead, A Waker and Dreamer (review)
Fri 22Stories FTAKay Keavney, Christina Stead (interview extract)
Wed 27Whispering GumsChristina Stead, Ocean of story (Review)
Fri 29Stories FTAChristina Stead, Ocean of story (nonfiction extract)

Arum Lilies

wadholloway Journal ,

Journal: 103

I haven’t had any work for the past couple of weeks, not that you could tell from either my reading or my blogging. I do have a job booked for next week, and I finally sold a trailer that has been on the market all year, so my bank balance is fine. Crass, I know, to talk about money. But having been broke previously as an owner driver I am very happy to be properly capitalised this time around, and anyway, I’m old and a comfortable or at least non-destitute retirement is always on my mind.

Now I’ve sold both my A-trailers, I will no longer run as a B-Double or B-Triple. My standard configuration will be a double road train – two drop decks connected by a dolly. If that’s double dutch, sorry, just let it go. But here’s another truck pic if that helps.

Arum lilies: Last weekend I went down to Gee’s bush block on the south coast. Arum lilies are all through her block, all through all the jarrah/karri/tuart forests; the “cane toads of the South West” according to the ABC. So I spent some hours grubbing out a patch close to the house, till working on 45 deg slopes did me in. Then we started the much delayed business of burning off the undergrowth which the previous ageing owners had allowed to get out of control. It was a bit damp, a bit late in the season, but at least that meant it was unlikely to get away. In fact we had to keep raking material, bracken and leaves, up to the fires to get them to move at all.

We rewarded ourselves with a trip to the local restaurant brewery, the Boston if you’re down that way, and seeing I for once wasn’t the driver I had an excellent 7.5% IPA to go with my also excellent (v & gf) pizza.

Going down and back I listened to the second Eden Robinson “Trickster” novel, Trickster Drift, which I won’t review, except here to say it was disappointing compared with Son of a Trickster. Just a drily told story of Jared’s first year away from home, with a lot more Native magic, and none of the grunge or romance of the first.

For my real reading I’m struggling to find the time/concentration to read Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy. I got Jack London out of the way before the month was over (just!) and now I’m started on Agnes Grey. An excellent Introduction by Angeline Goreau – who has written a couple of interesting-looking books, one about Aphra Benn and another on C17th women – gives some more background to the New Woman, and that is, by the 1850s there were nearly half a million more women than men in Britain, so of course they needed jobs.

That’s it for news. I’m on a diet – the 5 and 2 – properly this time, after getting 15 kg above my weight when I stopped swimming (in 2017), and I thought I was 7 or 8 kg overweight then. Exercise is a struggle, but I ride to Milly’s once or twice a week (when I’m home). Seeing as I often talk about us living on opposite sides of the river, I got Google to make a map, though in the middle (below) it takes a short-cut past the football stadium, so let’s say 5 km each way.

Recent audiobooks 

Holly Wainwright (F, Aus/NSW), The Couple Upstairs (2022)
Mark Brandi (M, Aus/Vic), The Rip (2019)
Ian Bone (M, Aus/xx), The Song of an Innocent Bystander (2002) – YA
Helen Fitzgerald (F, Aus/Vic), Keep Her Sweet (2022)
Cecilia Ekback (F, Sweden/Lapland/Canada), The Historians (2021) – Hist.Fic./Crime
Susan Wiggs (F, USA), Briar Rose (1987) – Nonsensical medieval romance DNF
Eden Robinson (F, Can), Trickster Drift (2018)

Currently Reading 

Jack London (M, USA), The Iron Heel (1908)
Anne Brontë (F, Aus/Tas), Agnes Grey (1847)
Alexis Wright (F, Aus/Qld), Praiseworthy (2023) – this will take a long, long time!

AWWC May 2023

DateContributorTitle
Wed 3Elizabeth LhuedeThe gambler’s wife and the fraudster’s daughter: Norah Skeffington Carroll
Fri 5Stories FTANorah Skeffington Carroll, The conversion of a celibate (short story)
Wed 10Stacey RobertsAboriginal domestic servants in colonial women’s fiction, 1854-1906
Fri 12Stories FTAJeannie Gunn, The Little Black Princess (fiction extract)
Wed 17Bill HollowayCaroline Leakey, The Broad Arrow (review)
Fri 19Stories FTACaroline Leakey, The Broad Arrow (fiction extract)
Wed 24Stacey RobertsFemale Domestic Service
Fri 26Stories FTAMabel Forrest, “Frances Floriline” (short story)
Wed 31Whispering GumsThe Australian Literature Society’s Women’s Nights, 1920s

Milly’s Moving

wadholloway Journal , ,

Journal: 081

This patio has been the centre of our family life for ten or twelve years. And now Milly’s moving! Not to a retirement village thank goodness. Rather, she’s bought a two bedroom ground floor flat in E. Perth, on the edge of the city, where she can walk to work, has sisters living nearby, plenty of parks, including along the Swan River, to walk the dog, and I’m just over the river and a kilometre or two upstream, with a bike path all the way.

Now it’s pack up the books, pack up the china, sort everything else into piles of keepers and chuckers, patch and paint the interior walls. The table in the foreground, 7 feet square and solid oregon, is from my last house (from my last marriage). Can I persuade Gee to make an indoor/outdoor area around it on her new seachange property?

We’ve both had the last few days off, but every time we think we can settle down to a solid day’s work, this grandchild or that, and sometimes multiples of them, have to be run after. Tonight, as I write, yesterday, as you read, ms 10 and mr 11 are staying over. In the morning I will go over (will have gone over, insert tenses to suit), cook them pancakes, palm them off to Gee, their mother and settle down to painting the sunroom walls and ceiling. I hope.

Milly’s done a bit of moving; was born in Kalgoorlie, grew up in the State Housing suburbs south of Fremantle, innumerable post-war jerry-built fibro houses on quarter acre (1,000 sq m) blocks of dirty white sand and patches of yellow grass; moved at 14 or 15 on the death of her father to Rivervale, another State Housing suburb on the edge of the city, where I live now, in an apartment block between the river and the Great Eastern Hwy, as all the old blocks south of the highway are snapped up as they become available, for sub-division (sub-sub-sub-division) and high density housing.

When I met her, I was mostly driving out of Adelaide, to Sydney, but I’d been given her sister’s address – a unit in Rivervale, one of the early ‘duplexes’, down the street from her mother – for “if I was ever in Perth”; and at the end of 1977 I was, drove my truck straight down her street from the highway; Milly answered the door.

By then she was a single mum; had worked all round Australia; came home to have the baby, Psyche; was living with her older sister and a mob of girls, or so it seemed – more sisters, friends, drop-ins from the suburb who had always treated Mavis’s, Milly’s mum’s, as their local hang-out. I was invited to stay, and did. By the following May we were a couple; and by the end of five years we had two more kids and had lived in six houses – Maylands, Karawarra, Northbridge, E. Vic Park – all within a few kilometers of the city.

The next move was a doozy. An old boss offered me a management job in Melbourne; we put our two cars and bits and pieces on my mate Kevin’s truck and crossed the country, me and Psyche (then 6) sharing the driving with Kevin; Milly and the two infants flying.

After a time with mum and dad, and then two run down rentals – and in between getting fired and having to find a new job – we finally had enough to buy a big old weatherboard house in Blackburn, a middle class suburb in Melbourne’s leafy east. Which lasted until we broke up in the early nineties. From there we had a succession of houses each, all in Melbourne; near each other, distant from, together for another 3 years, apart again. Her mother died and Milly was able to buy another house, further out; for a while yet again we lived together, but Milly had had enough rain and mud and went home to Perth and its sun and sand and sisters.

The kids and I kept her house going for a year, made the payments, started doing it up to sell. My most recent business, a partnership in a trucking company, had failed and I was back driving, road trains to north Queensland. Milly sold up – and this was my big break*, offered me a share of the proceeds. By early 2002 we were both back in Perth, Lou was at uni in Melbourne and the girls, separately, were working their way around the country. Milly got an admin job in mining, up north. I bought a flat in her name, bought her out, bought a house with my new wife, got left, bought another flat in Rivervale; while she had a restaurant in Fremantle, sold out, resumed working up north, bought this house, worked and worked in the endless FIFO grind, retired, started with Red Cross, and here we are today.

In all those moves I think we only used a removalist company once, to send Milly’s stuff from Melbourne back to Perth; otherwise it was loads in the ute, or trailers, or trucks borrowed from work, or as general freight at mates’ rates. My latest ute’s still going strong, but the body’s getting tired, so this one will definitely be ‘Two Men & a Truck’.

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photographs:
Milly’s 2022 (If you look hard you can see the famous christmas ladder)
Getting the rules right, 2018
Milly and Psyche, 1977
In a corner of the garden
Her own favourite view

Recent audiobooks 

Paul Theroux (M, USA), Under the Wave at Waimea (2021)
Amanda Lohrey (F, Aus/?), The Philosopher’s Doll (2004)
Mercedes Lackey (F, USA), A Study in Sable (2016) – Fantasy/Sherlock Holmes rip off
Francisco Stork (M, USA), Marcelo in the real world (2009) – YA/more Aspergers!
Ian Rankin (M, Sco), Freshmarket Close (2004) – Crime
Yasmin Angoe (F, USA), Her Name is Knight (2021) – Crime
Alex Haley (M, USA), The Autobigraphy of Malcolm X (1965) – NF

Currently Reading:

Helen Razer (F, Aus/Vic), The Helen 100 (2017) – Memoir
Octavia Butler (F, USA), Kindred (1979) – SF
Doris Lessing (F, Eng), Shikasta (1981) – SF
Drusilla Modjeska (F, Aus/NSW), Poppy (1990) – Biog.
David Adams ed. (F, Aus/NSW), The Letters of Rachel Henning (1951)
Elizabeth Jolley (F, Aus/WA), An Accommodating Spouse (1999)

I know. My real big break was Milly never (completely) losing faith in me.

Merciless Gods, Christos Tsiolkas

wadholloway Australian, Literature, Short Stories , , , ,

Merciless Gods (2014) is Tsiolkas’s first collection of short fiction. I have been listening to the stories over a couple of months as I had time to kill, the Audible version, read, sadly, by Humphrey Bower whose educated, rounded tones are a very poor match for Tsiolkas’s frequently rough and ethnic protagonists.

Melanie/Grab the Lapels wrote, when she was reading Tsiolkas for the first time (The Slap) that she felt she “was being pursued by penises”. James Ley writes of these stories, “they are notable for their preoccupation with sex and violence, which they frequently bring into uneasy alignment.” (Sydney Review of Books, 1 Sept 2015). I can only say that Christos Tsiolkas writes with his dick.

If you are interested in a proper review, follow the link to Ley. I’ve been listening to these stories over a number of months and barely remember the last few I listened to, let alone the first. I would not have attempted this ‘review’ at all except that one story, Civil War, concerns a young man hitchhiking from Perth, getting lifts with truck drivers across the Nullarbor. Just for you, I am going to have to listen to it again, at my desk, so I can pause it and take notes.

Here’s an admission, discussing this story with Milly over dinner at the Balmoral, she looks it up. Now, days later, I can’t find what she found, a list of chapter headings/story names. Luckily, she gave the story a name, the reading doesn’t (yes it does, I just wasn’t paying attention), and searching on ‘Civil War Tsiolkas’ I find an earlier version published in the Barcelona Review, Issue #86 (here), so suddenly excerpts are a whole lot easier.

I am thinking about God, what it would look like, taste like, smell like. Outside the window of the truck the ochre ocean of the Nullarbor spreads out before me. The massive vehicle I’m travelling in is dwarfed by the grandeur of the prehistoric earth. Its deep guttural snorts, its thundering wheels are no competition for the explosive silence of the desert. God is absent from this landscape. Or rather, God too is eclipsed by the rocks and the dirt, the scrub and sand.

In fact, truck driving is a cocoon, insulating you from the sounds, the smells, even the temperature outside. Your preoccupation, to the extent that you are paying attention, is the road, always the road, what’s ahead – traffic, kangaroos, rest stops – and how your truck is doing. Looking around requires effort.

Nothing can withstand the hold of the desert. The truck driver, over a working life of breathing in this landscape, is also becoming part of it.
‘Don’t you ever get bored by it?’
He laughs loudly and points out to the plain. ‘You can’t get bored by this. I get real fucking bored by this road, by the asphalt and the bloody white lines. But you can’t get bored by this,’ and again he points across the scrub. ‘This land that looks like an atom bomb hit it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

This is interesting, to me anyway, but is not the point of the story. In Perth, a “white city [living] in fear of the shadows cast by its black inhabitants”, the narrator has had a lover, a young Aboriginal man, who has died of a drug overdose.

I sat next to him and gently pulled out the syringe and took off his T-shirt, wiping away the vomit from around his mouth and chin.
I cried, but I’m still not sure if it was for him or for myself. I had not yet got to know this man who was still so very much a boy. I had been up his arse, I had sucked on his cock, but I knew very little about him. I knew that there was someone I should call: the police? the ambulance?

We move backwards and forwards, from the death and funeral of the young man, to the truck, a truckstop, a meeting of likeminded drivers.

‘People are getting ready … arming themselves. And who can blame them? The fucking government is in cahoots with the niggers, giving them all this land, paying them money so they can get drunk and piss it all away.’ He snorts angrily and accelerates. I offer neither resistance to nor approval of what he is saying.

The drivers are certain that a civil war is coming, that Aboriginal people are being armed “by the Jews”, and that they, we, must be armed to put them down. The truck moves off again, night falls, the narrator dozes, wakes to see a dark shape in front of them, a thump, ‘Sorry, mate, I think I might’ve just hit some pissed coon.’

A week later he’s in Sydney, making a new life.

I will feel safe and I will not question this safety. But occasionally, when a hot wind blows in from the west, I will remember that they are gathering guns in the outback.

Do truck drivers really talk like that, is that what’s going on in the other Australia, the not-Melbourne-Sydney? Maybe. They certainly use that language, and the idea that “The pricks up in Canberra keep giving them our money, buying them houses and cars” is widespread. But no one imagines that Indigenous people are armed, and hopefully the days of “dispersions” are over.

What really impressed me was not Tsiolkas’s “knowledge” of truck drivers but his self awareness as a white man that these thoughts are not entirely repressed in his own mind, nor in ours. As he leaves the family gathered around a fire in the backyard after the funeral –

And what about you, you bastards? I was thinking. What about you lot? You were family. You should have done something. And now you insult him. You were too busy drinking and getting out of it in your own way. You fucking good-for-nothing lazy black bastards.
I’m ashamed even as I write these words. But it would be more shameful to pretend I did not think them.

I don’t recommend you read Merciless Gods. I don’t even recommend you read ‘Civil War’. Tsiolkas is a fine writer but his endless sex and violence is wearing.

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Christos Tsiolkas, Merciless Gods, Allen & Unwin, 2014. Audio version Bolinda Books/Audible read by Humphrey Bower.

Smart Ovens for Lonely People, Elizabeth Tan

wadholloway Australian, Science Fiction, Short Stories , , ,

How many writers am I waiting for their next book? I suppose that should be How many writers are there whose next book I am waiting for? I wonder if I can get that for away from the end. How many writers are there for whose next book I am waiting? It feels like it should be for whom’s. Grammar’s not my strong point.

Elizabeth Tan is the only one I can think of I said I was waiting for (sorry, for whom I said I was waiting) but if you said Kim Scott, Claire Coleman, Alexis Wright, Gerald Murnane had a new book out I’d be down the street in a flash – the iso rules for truck drivers in WA permit essential shopping. I wonder who else. There can’t be many.

As it happens the flash was a bit muted for Tan. Smart Ovens has been out about six months.

I could die happy with Tan and Coleman writing (good) Western Australia based SF. I suppose there are others. I wonder what happened to … . DuckDuckGoes “WA SF”. There’s a Western Australian Science Fiction Foundation! With its own radio show!

You might remember Tan’s last (and first) was Rubik, a novel of loosely connected episodes, set in Perth WA, up the surreal end of SF. Smart Ovens is the same but the ‘episodes’ aren’t connected.

A children’s slide ups and runs away; mermaids kept in a restaurant fish tank, in the casino of course, metamorphose, find freedom; long after pens are a thing Ira gives one to a homeless man who scrawls kilometres of ink on the subway walls before stepping in front of a train; Pikelet was born in the Year of the Rabbit after the Year of Unprecedented Ecological Terror, her family moved to New Zealand following the Year of Seven Different Prime Ministers, and she now works at “Eighteen Bells Karaoke Castle, Perth’s premiere karaoke destination, in the heart of the city with a view of Old Swan River”; Tom and Ant are lovers, Tom knows that Ant is a spy but Ant doesn’t; and so the stories go on, lots of them concepts you wouldn’t dream of and yet Tan makes them real, spins them out for 5 or ten pages. In Would You Rather things start to disappear:

What did it look like? A flaw in the morning, a hanging pixel. An iridescent chip in the shape of a rhombus, shimmering in the sky. Unnoticed for days, until all the bicycles lifted up on one wheel, and then the other; turned counter-clockwise in the air, handlebars raised like the antlers of a stag, sliding riders from their seats; floated towards the hole, and then through the hole, and then …

So it’s not just the ideas, it’s the writing; writing and ideas and stories and Perth and young Asian-Australian women and a post eco-apocalyptic future of decay and magic.

And the smart ovens? “After that day at the overpass I was assigned an oven.” That day at the overpass, she of course jumped, and so was assigned an oven for a year to be her friend in the kitchen. With an extra six months if the oven’s end-of-year report was unsatisfactory.

After Neko Oven had been activated for two weeks she [for Neko Oven was programmed with a female voice] sent a recommendation to Biljana to let me return to work…

On my lunchbreak I used the kitchenette microwave to heat up a little plastic container of Neko Oven’s leftovers (some kind of casserole she’d improvised from tinned chick-peas, bacon, and gin) and took it to the food court to eat alone.

When she runs into the guy who chose that overpass, that day, that same minute to jump, they discuss ‘why’.

When people asked ‘How are you?’ did they really mean ‘Why did you?’

Because I was tired.
Because I wanted to die, the same way you might want a drink of water, or want to sleep, or want someone to love you back.

That last is it of course. But with a smart oven life goes on.

.

Elizabeth Tan, Smart Ovens for Lonely People, Brio, Sydney, 2020. 244pp.

*The SF book I was thinking of [… Hal Spacejock by Simon Haynes. I found it, randomly shelved, when I got home, and he has 12 more, going by ‘images’] involves a young entrepreneur with a bucket of bolts space ship and an android pilot. The name Matt is in there somewhere. I used to know the book’s editor. Fremantle Press. I DDG Fremantle Press, they don’t have SF as one of their genres! They do have a new Dave Warner. One of you is having a crime fiction month soon [Kim/Reading Matters in March], so that’s my book sorted. They’re also still advertising Robert Edeson, so there is at least some SF (here and here). From two or three years ago.

(Not) Going Places

wadholloway Australian, Journal , ,

Journal: 062

It astonishes me just how ignorant public speakers – journalists, politicians, writers – are of spelling, vocabulary, general knowledge, and how infrequently they are called out for it. It’s a long time since I listened to the ABC’s “local” network – except for football of course – but the self-important pronouncements of men and women whose only qualification is that they have mellow voices is constantly off-putting, not to mention the ABC’s official “non-partisan” stance of giving right-wing lies equal billing with proven science.

The following, not ABC, examples came up this morning while I was reading on-line

Trump fans are calling for “succession” when they mean secession, and that’s pretty much how their night is going. It’s also a reminder that we need to invest more in education.

Palmer Report, 11 Dec 2020

The punishment metered (sic) out to both banks resulted in board and senior management changes, massive fines and reputational damage.

Adele Ferguson, The Age, “Casinos Lose”, 12 Dec 2020

Of course my own spelling is not the best and the number of times I have typed slef instead of self … The quotes were unplanned, what really got my goat was Lindsey Davis in The Ides of April who not once but repeatedly used opaque to mean see-through. As in Flavia Albia, the heroine, standing up to address a crowd in an “opaque” dress and everyone could see her legs. Remember back in the day when editors read what they were publishing.

So here I am, home at last, sitting at the computer, bookwork neglected, waffling on. Just reading odd stories mostly, or getting up to make a sandwich. My next post will be a book review. Promise! It has taken all day, 8 hours at least, to get this far. A proper Perth summer day, stinking hot, me sitting in shorts and nothing else sweating in front of an inadequate fan.

I crossed the border Wednesday latish, so, with a whole day up my sleeve (to do 14 days iso and make it to xmas dinner). Unloaded yesterday, Friday. Milly will drop in tomorrow, she has the grandkids tonight, yet another pancake breakfast I have to forego. She’s five years younger than me (yes I know, than I, but who says than I), already retired and now, moving into a retirement village. My mother’s in a retirement village! And way down the coast. Milly’s retirement village I mean. I have a house down that way so I may have to move to stay in touch.

I’ve been writing (and thinking) a lot about place. Perth is a long, narrow city of 1.1 million people, stretching 100 km along endless white Indian Ocean beaches, on a 20 km wide stretch of sandflats between the ocean and the low hills of the Darling Range, bisected by the Swan River, an insignificant stream opening up in front of the CBD to the lovely expanse of Perth Water. Milly’s new home will be at the southern end of the conurbation, on the estuary of another small waterway, the Peel. Why, I wonder, am I the only one who writes like this. Well, not only, Pam is probably even more passionate about Hobart.

Very early in my blogging life I wrote about an idea I called Intertextual Geography, and more recently I posted on a Tony Hughes-d’Aeth essay on Regional Literature. This is where I’m up to so far on the subject of ‘Place’:

  1. Our knowledge of a given place influences how we read fiction set there; and what we read influences how we see/experience that place.
  2. Writers in a place are influenced by each other, hence Regional Literature.
  3. A regional writer is an ambassador, for good or evil!, presenting his/her place to others.
  4. Much more importantly, our regional writers present our place to us, giving us new ways of experiencing and understanding it.

Now do you see why I get so angry when writers get places wrong? No? I thought not, but I’ll keep chewing away at it anyway.

In comments after the Hughes-d’Aeth review, WG raises the interesting question of how we deal with the different relationship of Indigenous writers to places with which we whites also have a relationship. More to think about. Perhaps I should say:

5. There is no place in Australia (or Canada or the USA) which was not for millenia before our arrival significant to the indigenous people of that place.

Which is trite, but then we’re not proving very good at sharing, are we. Which is as good a segue as any to this story from today’s New York Times: “Of the 7,124 books [widely read, major publishers, 1950-2018] for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.” (NYT, 11 Dec 2020, Why is Publishing so White?)

Playing with the Block Editor/Slideshow: Some images of Perth Water (mine, to forestall copyright issues, and one of Milly’s of South Beach, Freo at sunset)

Recent audiobooks 

Margaret Atwood (F, Can), Cat’s Eye (1988)
Suzanne Enoch (F, USA), Angel’s Devil (1995) – Romance
Michael Connelly (M, USA), The Black Echo (1992) – Crime
Leah Fleming (F, Eng), The Girl under the Olive Tree (2013) – Hist.Fic.
Christopher Spielberg (M, Ger), 101 Nights (2003) – Crime
Emma Hart (F, Eng), The Roommate Agreement (2019) – Romance
Mary Anna Evans (F, USA), Floodgates (2009) – Crime
Lindsey Davis (F, Eng), The Ides of April (2013) – Hist.Fic/Crime
Ruth Downie (F, Eng), Vita Brevis (2016) – Hist.Fic/Crime
Pilip K Dick (M, USA), Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970) – SF
Donna Milner (F, Can), The Promise of Rain (2010) – Hist.Fic (WWII)
Alain de Botton (M, UK), The Course of Love (2016) – a very long lecture
Lydia Millet (F, USA), Mermaids in Paradise (2014) – Gen.Fic
John Marrs (M, UK), The Good Samaritan (2017) – Crime
Isabel Miller (F, USA), Patience & Sarah (1969)
Paolo Bacigalupi (M, USA), Pump Six & Other Stories (2008) – SF
JD Robb (F, USA), Wonderment in Death (2015) – SF/Crime
Martha Mitchell (F, USA), Gone with the Wind (1936) DNF
Fern Michaels (F, USA), Fancy Dancer (2012) – Romance
Norman Mailer (M, USA), Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984)– Crime
John Connolly (M, Ire), The Unquiet (2007) – Crime
Adam Mitzner (M, USA), The Girl from Home (2016)– Crime

I also started Dickens’ Dombey & Son, 39 hours!, but the publisher, Brilliance Audio, had made a hash of the first disc, replacing some chapters with unrelated medieval history, so I was forced to give up.

Currently reading, planning to read

Ursula Le Guin (F, USA), The Unreal & the Real
Christina Stead (F, Aust/NSW), The Little Hotel
Kylie Tennant (F, Aust/NSW), Tell Morning This
Ernestine Hill (F, Aust/NSW), The Great Australian Loneliness
Joseph Furphy (M, Aust/Vic), Such is Life