Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome

From the favourer: "For once, the general public got it right. I first read it over 20 years ago and was amazed (and a little annoyed as I was about 30 by then myself) that someone, somewhere, hadn't told me about it earlier. So, if you haven't read it, delay no more. You can thank me afterwards."

When a comedic novel is first published in 1889, you’d expect by now that the jokes would, well, date a bit. Like the cartoons from Dickensian newspapers and Shakespearean comedies, where you can’t exactly work out what the joke is (although in Shakespeare the joke is usually a man in a dress. Hilarious.)

Perhaps the longevity of the humour in Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) has to do with its honesty about travel (flowing on rather nicely from The Art of Travel) and people. As the author says in his preface, George, Harris and Montmorency (the dog) “are not poetic ideals but things of flesh and blood – especially George, who weighs about twelve stone.” And of course, what we really want to hear about other people’s travels are the bits that went wrong. And preferably involve someone showing off and being shown up.

Upon publication Three Men in a Boat was snatched up lovingly by the general public and derided by the critics as being vulgar and written for the "‘Arrys and ‘Arriets" (kind of the Kath and Kels of the time). Probably a good sign.

The story begins as the author and his two friends George and Harris are sitting around with their pipes, and discussing their general malaise (the author, on perusal of a medical dictionary, has discovered he suffers from every disease known to man, except Housemaid’s Knee: “I felt rather hurt at this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation?”). They conclude that what they need is to get away from it all, and a boating trip up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford is planned.

What follows is the “record of events that really happened” on this trip; part travelogue, part floridly described reverie (which the author keeps being dragged away from as he’s about to the crash the boat) and part tangential anecdotes about storing cheeses.

Lots of the stories are a smile-out-loud read, such as when the author stops Harris from singing a comic song:

“You have never heard Harris sing a comic song, or you would understand the service I had rendered to mankind. It is one of Harris’s fixed ideas that he can sing a comic song; a fixed idea, on the contrary, among those of Harris’s friends who have heard him try, is that he can’t, and never will be able to, and that he should not be allowed to try.

When Harris is at a party and asked to sing, he replies: ‘Well, I can only sing a comic song, you know’; and he says it in a tone that implies that his singing of that, however, is a thing that you ought to hear once, and then die.

‘Oh, that is nice,’ says the hostess. ‘Do sing one, Mr Harris’; and Harris gets up, and makes for the piano, with the beaming cheeriness of a generous-minded man who is just about to give somebody something.

‘Now, silence, please, everybody,’ says the hostess, turning round, ‘Mr Harris is going to sing a comic song!’

‘Oh, how jolly!’ they murmur; and they hurry in from the conservatory, and come up from the stairs, and go and fetch each other from all over the house, and crowd into the drawing-room, and sit round, all smirking in anticipation.

Then Harris begins.

Well, you don’t look for much of a voice in a comic song. You don’t expect correct phrasing or vocalization. You don’t mind if a man does find out, when in the middle of a note, that he is too high, and comes down with a jerk. You don’t bother about time. You don’t mind a man being two bars in front of the accompaniment, and easing up in the middle of a line to argue it out with the pianist, and then starting the verse afresh. But you do expect the words.

You don’t expect a man to never remember more than the first three lines of the first verse, and to keep on repeating these until it is time to begin the chorus. You don’t expect a man to break off in the middle of a line, and snigger, and say, it’s very funny but he’s blest if he can think of the rest of it, and then try and make it up for himself, and, afterwards, suddenly recollect it, when he has got to an entirely different part of the song, and break off without a word of warning, to go back and let you have it then and there.”

It’s all pretty delightful and unserious, and could probably be prescribed as a good alternative to anti-depressants (much like P.G. Wodehouse, who I always read when I feel sad).

Most of the fun comes from the general wrestling with the realities of travel, in this case, boat travel. When they try to set up the tent-like cover over the boat ready for the night; “it would take quite ten minutes, we thought.

That was an underestimate.

We took up the hoops, and began to drop them into the socket places for them. You would not imagine this to be dangerous work; but, looking back now, the wonder to me is that any of us are alive to tell the tale. They were not hoops, they were demons. First they would not fit into their sockets at all, and we had to jump on them, and kick them, and hammer at them with the boat-hook; and, when they were in, it turned out that they were the wrong hoops for those particular sockets, and they had to come out again.

But they would not come out, until the two of us had gone and struggled with them for five minutes, when they would jump up suddenly, and try and throw us into the water and drown us. They had hinges in the middle, and, when we were not looking, they nipped us with these hinges in the delicate parts of the body; and, while we were wrestling with one side of the hoop, and endeavouring to persuade it to do its duty, the other side would come behind us in a cowardly manner, and hit us over the head…It took us half an hour’s hard labour, after that, before it was properly up, and then we cleared the decks, and got out supper. We put the kettle onto boil, up in the nose of the boat, and went down to the stern and pretended to take no notice of it, but set to work to get the other things out.

That is the only way to get a kettle to boil up the river. If it sees that you are waiting for it and are anxious, it will never even sing. You have to go away and begin your meal, as if you were not going to have any tea at all. You must not even look round at it. Then you will soon hear it sputtering away, mad to be made into tea.

It is a good plan, too, if you are in a great hurry, to talk very loudly to each other about how you don’t need any tea, and are not going to have any. You get near the kettle so that it can overhear you, and then you shout out, ‘I don’t want any tea; do you George?’ to which George shouts back ‘Oh, no, I don’t like tea; we’ll have lemonade instead, tea’s so indigestible.’ Upon which the kettle boils over, and puts the stove out.”

The actual journey of the book is apparently still quite recognizable (and replicable) today, if you know the towns by the river they are traveling through - which I don’t, but it doesn’t matter reading-wise. So, if you’re planning a boating trip up the Thames (aren’t we all), perhaps you could follow their itinerary.

And if it rains, and you can’t take it any more, you can always follow their lead – lie to the boatman that you’re not running away from the rain and the boat is to be ready for you at nine the next morning, but “if anything unforeseen should happen” preventing your return, you will “write to him”. Then bugger off to the pub and home.

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I've registered this book on Bookcrossing and will be releasing it into the wild in a week - but if you'd like to have it, email me before then and I'll post it to you instead!

Due dates

This morning I lent a dvd to a borrower and stamped the due date in the front (yes, we still stamp date slips at the Rowden White Library).

Me: "There you go."

Borrower: "Thanks. When is it due?"

Me, looking at the dvd: "In a week."

Borrower: *horrified pause, staring at my 6-months-pregnant belly* "A week??!!"

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

From the favourer: "The thing I loved is that it's the universal guidebook applicable to all travels. It also implores readers to make sure they engage in the travel experience in a way that is personally meaningful and not just ticking items off a list."

Travelling is an art. It's not one I do exceptionally well (I do it so it feels like hell, in fact). I am a bad traveller, and when I say to people "I don't like travelling", they look at me like I've said "I enjoy boiling puppies". There are three main reasons I'm a bad traveller.

1. I hate discomfort, physical and psychological. Not 'discomfort' in a doctorly "you may experience some mild discomfort" sense (which translates as "you will now suffer agonising pain"). Just the ordinary uncomfortableness of plane seats, being too hot, having to say the same thing all over again, not knowing where you're going, etc. If I had somone to carry all my luggage for me all the time when I travelled, I reckon I'd be about 50% better at it.

2. I hate unfamiliarity. I'm best at going back to places I've been to before, and much happier going anywhere for the second time. This is a bit of a problem as generally to go anywhere, you have to go there for the first time sometime.

3. I'm a self-conscious traveller. In the immortal words of Jarvis Cocker: "Everybody hates a tourist". I feel like all the locals hate me all the time. Because of this I always tried to be nice to tourists in Warrnambool when I worked in the bookshop there, even when they asked really stupid questions like: "What time are the whales on?". I didn't say "It's not Sea World, guys." I just politely explained that as they were wild, the whales showed up whenever they felt like it, so you just had to try your luck to see them. Only once, when we were really busy, did I say to one man "They're on at 3pm" (and he seemed quite happy with that anyway).

These may seem like small reasons, but given that most travelling (unless you're stinking rich) is basically about being uncomfortable, in unfamiliar situations, and being a tourist, I find my small reasons get bigger fairly quickly. I think Alain de Botton would understand.

The Art of Travel is a guidebook to the why, rather than the how or what of travelling. Each chapter takes an author/artist/thinker (starting with our old friend Joris-Karl Huysmans) and uses their work as a 'travel guide' to a particular country de Botton is visiting, exploring notions such as anticipation, the sublime, the exotic, beauty and habit.

It's a neat little structure, part personal reflection, part travelogue, and part philosophical/art/literary history. He can be a bit of a romantic (I initially had trouble working out when he was quoting Huysmans and when he was writing as himself), but his reflections often have an appealing honesty that balances this. He notes things like how an argument with a partner over who gets which serving of creme brulee can totally spoil the appreciation you should be having of a Barbados sunset.

Journeying through Madrid (with Alexander von Humbolt as our guide), de Botton reflects that travel works better when there is a driving interest behind why you've gone to the place - a mission, of sorts. The danger is in taking in many unconnected 'sights' in a row "before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain." 'Sight-seeing', it's an ugly compound.

I always made myself keep a diary when I travelled (and no, it wasn't all whingeing. That would bore even me), to 'keep' moments of the journey - small details without which the memory of travelling becomes a bit of a coffee-table-book blur. With John Ruskin as our guide in the chapter On Possessing Beauty, de Botton explores our need to 'possess' the beauty we find on our travels; "to buy something - a bowl, a laquered box or a pair of sandals...to be reminded of what we have lost, like a lock of hair that we cut from a departing lover's mane." (I know what he means, but someone really ought to have a quiet word to Alain - cutting bits of your ex-partner's hair off is creepy and liable to land you with a restraining order.)

De Botton recommends word-painting or drawing on your travels as a better way to really "eat a place", rather than blindly taking photos. I think there's photo-taking and photo-taking though - some people take real care with the framing and composition of their travel photos. But I guess it's easy to take a thoughtless photo, not so easy to do a thoughtless drawing or written description.

I think my favourite chapter (apart from the first one, but that's because Huysmans' Des Esseintes and I have similar attitudes to travel) is the one on Xavier de Maistre and his notion of "room travel", which de Botton (not being blessed with a spacious bedroom), extends to "neighbourhood travel". He decides to spend his walk to the Underground actually paying attention to the details of his surroundings rather just barging along. This really appealed to me, as I spend my walk to the bus each day basically looking at stuff - for instance, currently there's a bandaid stuck to a tree at the top of the hill, a huge dump of lilly-pillies that are gradually being crushed into the footpath, and a newly printed 'NO ENTRY' across a one-way street that's all raised and clean and nice. I know the sleeping places of the neighbourhood cats and which ones will come over, and I name the trees and birds that I know (in a species kind of way, not a "Hi Bob, hi Sandra" kind of way).

Introspective thoughts, who needs 'em. I much prefer de Botton and de Maistre "gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen."

Come and work at the Rowden White Library

Our lovely lady librarian Aimee has gone to a new job at the Bionic Ear Institute (or as we like to refer to it, the Ionic Beer Institute).

Fool!

But you can apply for her job:

Library Officer @ the Rowden White Library.

It's fun! There's often cake! But it's no easy task; you can't just be ace and like cake. You have to be a qualified librarian and ace and like cake.

It's a tough trifecta.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

From the favourer: "It was the numerous characters and the way he wrote the story that made me think "Wow!" - it is so complex with all the (partly perverted) details, I didn't think anyone could make something like that up. It does not happen often that I actually like a book that others tell me to read because it is a classic."

So after so much reading for the judging, I thought I’d pick something not too taxing to read from the favourites list. I hadn’t read any Marquez before, and I thought from the look of it “Yes, that looks like an enjoyable piece of literary fiction that won’t be in any way confusing or require me to keep 100 years of characters who all have the same name in my head at once.”

I can hear those of you who’ve read this book laughing at me from here.

One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the fortunes of a family line in the fictional small town of Macondo over at least a century. Births, deaths, marriages, wars, people who are followed around by clouds of yellow butterflies, cousins who float up towards heaven and are never seen again – you know, the usual stuff.

When I told people I was having real difficulty understanding this book, they usually replied “it’s magic realism”, as if this explained things. Magic realism is when weird shit happens in everyday life and you need to accept that and move on, buddy. It didn’t actually occur to me as I was reading it that the fantastic bits were anything out of the ordinary; perhaps as my reading intersperses non-genred literature with fantasy novels it all seemed perfectly acceptable.

I think the main reason I found this book so difficult to keep straight in my head was that everyone has the same name. Alright, not just one name, but considerably less than your fair share. We start with Jose Arcadio Buendia. It’s all his fault. He has children: Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadio, and Amaranta. Colonel Aureliano has a son called Aureliano Jose, and, by all different women, seventeen other sons named Aureliano. They become known as ‘The Aurelianos’ throughout the book. Jose Arcadio has a son named Arcadio, who has children named Aureliano Segundo Remedios and Jose Arcadio Segundo. Aureliano Segundo has children named Renata Remedios, Jose Arcadio and Amaranta Ursula. Renata has a son named Aureliano, and Amaranta Ursula has a son named Aureliano.

Got that? It’s rather like that chapter in the bible where everyone begets everyone else. I didn’t work that out on my own either, there’s a family tree at the start of the book. For a while I kept referring to it, trying to work out who everyone was, but all I was begetting was a state of confusion so in the end I decided just to go with the flow and not worry too much about keeping all the Arcadios and Aurelianos straight. I’m not sure if this was the best idea, because sometimes an Arcadio died and it didn’t mean much to me as I had thought he was the Arcadio who had died a few chapters earlier. Paul suggested maybe they’d make a movie of the book and then I’d be able to tell everyone apart, but I have a suspicion it would be like when I watch Westerns – every man has a moustache, brown clothes and braces and may as well be the same actor. Looking closer at the cover of the book, I’m thinking I might be right in this:



So, just as I was despairing of having any thoughts about this book other than “who?”, I started to notice a building up of repetitions and circularities throughout the generations of the family line.

A theme! Thank God!

The Aurelianos are all psychically sensitive and intelligent, the Arcadios are all physically powerful, characters repeat the actions and mistakes of their forbears (and their forbears often turn up as ghosts to watch). The women tend to reject the men who passionately love them (which leads to the men committing suicide and the women – who really did love their suitors – spending the rest of their lives in regretful mourning). Some characters fight this repetition – like trying to name their children something other than Aureliano or Remedios, but fortune always intervenes and draws them back into the family cycle.

The notion of this circularity is evoked subtly in the middle of the book by Ursula, who notices “that every member of the family, without realizing it, repeated the same path every day, the same actions, and almost repeated the same words at the same hour.” Towards the end of the novel it is noted more explicitly again by Ursula: “time was not passing…but that it was turning in a circle” and by Pilar Tenera: “the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”

So by the time I finished, the notion of circularity had kind of strung it all together for me, and I felt a bit less dumb (I can save the pregnancy-brain-shrinking excuse for another day).

And it is actually a very enjoyable book in terms of the act of reading, with healthy amounts of sex, plus some incest thrown in for good measure (with that many people with the same name, I suppose you’re always going to end up shagging your aunt at some point). Of course I’m reading it in translation, but it’s beautifully written and translated, without that ‘pared back’ feeling some translations seem to have. There’s a lot of fragments that stay with you after reading this book – the construction and destruction of the little gold fishes, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s experiments with alchemy and pianolas, seeing ice for the first time in a gypsy tent.

The whimsy of the magic realism is nicely tempered by Marquez’s sense of humour and the ridiculous (I have a bit of a low tolerance for books that get too whimsical). When folding the sheets one day, Remedios the Beauty floats up into the air and disappears, and everyone hails it as a divine event. Fernanda, on the other hand “burning with envy, finally accepted the miracle, and for a long time she kept on praying to God to send her back her sheets.” Fair enough too, sheets are expensive.

I laughed at Gaston, who “was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.” Which is all a bit Spike Milligan somehow.

For quoteableness, you can’t go past: “The world must be all fucked up…when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”

And I’ve learned my lesson. My son will not be named Arcadio.

19 weeks

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it's a boy! Nice little dude.

He's actually 23 weeks now, but getting around to capturing images off our ultrasound dvd (fancy fancy) took me a few weeks to get around to.

Dress-ups and acceptances

The Rowden White Library 70th birthday party of course went swimmingly, with about 400-500 students (and post-students) turning up to dispatch massive amounts of cake and booze:

And staff in their costumed best (we each came as different sections of the library):

Alice Pung made a nice speech about how we are great (yay us), and of course we all sang 'happy birthday' to the Rowdy. There's something nicely absurd about 500 people singing "Happy birthday dear library...". We're still finding rogue helium balloons hiding in corners. More photos here.

Then I got a cold (which sucked), then I got 2 poems accepted at pageseventeen and 1 at Westerly (which does not suck). So now I can feel a little bit writerly when I go the the Melbourne Writer's Festival tomorrow morning to see Kate Atkinson and other randomly chosen sessions (o! the joy of a volunteer's free-entry lanyard).