Need something to read?

 Need something to read? Preferably not gold-stickered by the Women's Weekly Book Club?

My nicely corporeal boyfriend and reading-machine @timsterne has blog where he is writing about each of the books he reads this year (and other stuff, because that's what is blog).

He is funny and and excellent writer (I'd say I was biased but I thought that before we hooked up anyway), and he mostly reads things I've never heard of so it's a nice antidote to the FTBCOD (First Tuesday Book Club of Doom).

Head over to Respectable Street.

There's also sometimes guest appearances by Luka's ludicrous super-hero figurines.

“I’m looking for a book. It’s got half a woman’s face on it.”

Something stirs in my gut, and it’s not the dry Weetbix with butter and vegemite, the block of Golden Rough and the bottle of red that I had for dinner last night. (Although incidentally, that particular meal will produce an almost identical sensation five hours from now.)

This is something quite different. It’s an affliction that hits me in bookshops, particularly the big, who-gives-a-fuck-what-you’re-looking-for kind of book-supermarket that would rather you BYO dowsing stick than pay their staff enough to make them to actually want to help you.

Sorry, did I say that out loud?

Anyway, this particular affliction is commonly known as EBSNU. Before you say ‘Gesundheit!’, I should advise that EBSNU stands for Ex-Book-Seller Ninja Urge.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was not always the mild-mannered librarian you see before you. My name is Anna Ryan-Punch and I used to be a bookseller. I pulled all the moves. I told you your order would arrive in 7-10 days (which means I have no idea when your book will arrive but I really hope it’s not me who serves you when you come back to ask about it). I suggested a novel for your birthday present to your 9-year-old son who ‘hates reading’, when what I really wanted to suggest was that you get him something he’d actually like. I knew that you meant Rushdie’s Satanic Verses when you asked if we had the Satanic Bible, though I was always tempted to ring up a copy of the latter. I found you books for your daughter at university who you didn’t understand any more, books for your 80-year-old aunt who hates swearing and sex, books for your baffling 16-year-old son who knocks off two novels a day, and most importantly, I found you the books that you couldn’t remember the title or author of, but you definitely know there is a part where someone has sex with a bear.

I’m standing in Borders at the Jam Factory (this blog post brought to you by the wonder of memory combined with first person present tense). I’ve got The Subtle Knife in one hand and Guns, Germs & Steel in the other. The books, I mean. I may be an EBSN but I don’t actually carry throwing stars.

“I’m looking for a book. It’s got half a woman’s face on it.”

My EBSN aerial extends from my head and locks into place with an audible click. (This is a lie. I am not, in fact a cyborg. But I did imagine an aerial extending from my head, and I may or may not have made a little clicking noise with my tongue as I imagined it locking into place).

The book she’s looking for is Tully. It’s obviously Tully. The shop assistant (I can see at once he is not a true book-seller) hums a bit and asks the standard non-ESBN questions.

“Can you remember anything about the author or the title?”

The woman shakes her head impatiently. “You’d know it,” she says. “It’s got half a woman’s face on it.” I run out of willpower at this point; I relapse. I place my weapon-related books gently down on the bench and sidestep out of sight behind a wall of Frank McCourt. Then I scurry, head-down, to the fiction section and locate the Paullina Simons wing. Five seconds later I’m back at the info desk. The woman is still there, and by the look on the shop assistant’s face I can tell she’s now said “It’s got half a woman’s face on it” upwards of twenty times.

“Sorry,” I interrupt, “Are you looking for Tully?”

The woman turns towards me and for a minute I don’t know if she’s going to hug me or stick me with a nearby copy of The Subtle Knife. I hold the Simons out in front of me and she almost snatches it from my hands. “That’s IT!” She points angrily at the shop assistant. “He didn’t know what it was, and he works here.” I smile beatifically and melt into the night. By which I mean I pick up my two books and ask the shop assistant if they have an EFTPOS minimum.

EBSNU is a relatively common phenomenon. It’s about two-thirds as common as ex-booksellers, but half as common as remaining a bookseller for more than five years. I did first year stats at uni, just go with me on this.

And like any addiction, there’s the rush, the high, and then you need more. But hanging around in bookshops eavesdropping on customer service is as acceptable as drinking light beer at a B&S Ball. Or, should you prefer your references more high-brow, it’s as acceptable as ordering a Becks at Beer Deluxe.

It’s best to stay calm and let the EBSNU moments come to you. My personal crowning moment comes 10 years later, when the EBSN in me has been soothed by years of Dewey shelving and non-retail-related book dealings. I probably couldn’t recommend a book I hate if my life depended on it.

Let me preface my moment of glory by providing a piece of information: my mother collects books by relatively obscure and mostly out of print author Beverley Nichols, who wrote everything from children’s books to books about flower-arranging.

Fascinating, isn’t it? "Your parents collect pipes? That's really interesting!"*

Anyway, I am lurking in Readings Carlton, that haven for booksters and desperate parents whose toddlers love the train-set table. (Why are you all looking at me?) The Readings staff are most definitely book-sellers, and I suspect there may even be a few BSNs among them. I am hovering in the poetry section because I know I won’t have to move my bag out of anyone’s way.

“It’s by a man with a woman’s name, and it’s about people who live in a tree.”

I freeze. Did anyone hear a small ‘click’? I know what the book is, and I know it’s out of print. And this, dear reader, is where EBSNU goes meta.

“A man writing under a female pseudonym?” asks the book-seller.

“No,” says the woman. “He’s just got a name that sounds like a woman’s name. Like Evelyn, but not Evelyn. I think it’s a kid’s book.”

“Is it a new title?” asks the book-seller.

“I don’t know,” says the woman.

By this point I have fished out my iPhone, typed in the Abebooks web address with trembling fingers, found a second hand bookshop in Bendigo that has a copy of The Tree That Sat Down in stock and written the details down on a post-it note. (I always carry post-it notes. Librarian status: alpha.)

I glide up to the info desk, leaving my bag safely in the poetry section.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” I say, because I am secretly Jessica Fletcher. “But I think the book you’re looking for is The Tree That Sat Down by Beverley Nichols.” Here I pause and wait for the ‘That’s IT!’

“THAT’S it!” exclaims the woman. Different emphasis, but pretty standard.

The book-seller looks it up. “I’m afraid it’s out of print,” she says. The woman looks crestfallen.

“It is,” I say, “but if you phone or email this secondhand store - ” here I proffer my post-it, “they have it in stock, and the others in the series too.”

The woman takes the post-it note from me with the degree of reverence reserved for dealing with people you suspect are a bit mental. “Thankyou,” she says uneasily.

I turn, and without another word glide out of the shop on a wave of adrenalin. Then I turn around, go back and retrieve my bag from the poetry section and slink out another way.

This is the life of the EBSN. We are not high mages or good fairies, do not worship us for our mystical skills. We are simple junkies looking for a fix. We are everywhere, dear reader.

And we’re listening.

________________________

*obligatory obscure reference. See here at about the 2 min mark.

Confession: I did several creative writing subjects in my university years.

I know, I know. But I was young. I had Intellectually Romantic Notions.

I thought that each tutorial I'd have my stories and poems ferociously torn apart by my fellow scribblers and my faults laid bare in revelatory fashion (possibly with evocative jump-cuts between me and the other students). Or perhaps rather than cowing to their superior knowledge, I would go on to argue a devastating Gregory-Peck-style case for why I’d written what I’d written. Then next week I'd help do the same for their writing. We would appreciate our conflicting views and fierce arguments, and come away ready to confront our writing in new and risky ways.

Like I said, I was young.

Also I'd watched too many films involving writing workshop sequences.

So as we all sat quietly around the table each week, tentatively murmuring "That was good, I like your images," and "I was interested in how you changed tense halfway through", I started to wonder what I was actually going to learn. I wasn't going to learn to critique others, and I wasn't going to get critiqued in the way I’d hoped for if we were all going to be so goddamn nice all the time.

But actual assessment would be different, I thought. My tutors were writers I admired, so obviously I would get the sandblasting I wanted. I’d get opinions about which bits of my writing were the written equivalent of Roquefort, which bits were Tasmanian Heritage camembert, and which were Kraft 'parmesan-style' vomit flakes that come in a shaker you don't even need to keep in the fridge.

I would think hard about their opinions, possibly while ordering a cheese platter, and then decide for myself what I thought.

My assignments generally came back looking like this [circa 2004]:

This form of assessment didn’t really fit with my anticipated cheese/writing analogy.

The ‘big tick scenario’ could have meant three things.

1. It could have meant that I was an absolute freakin prodigy at 19, and should have just quit uni and waited a couple of weeks for my first publishing contract to land in my lap. Obviously this one was correct. Ahem.

2. It could have meant there was just so much wrong with what I'd written that the tutor saw no point even starting a detailed critique because she was only paid a flat fee for marking, not per assignment and certainly not per hour.

3. It could have meant she was being sensitive about possible (but non-existent) neuroses about having my writing criticised. I’ve never been overly attached to creative pieces I’ve written, once they’re finished. I’ll rework pretty much anything, especially if it gets me a paid publication. As Jim Rockford once said: “There’s two things I won’t do for money. I won’t marry for it and I won’t kill for it. Other than that I’m open to just about anything.”

Anyway. What I wanted was for my habits to be trampled and bloodied and my awkward writing structures to be cracked in half over my head like Anne Shirley in charge of a slate. I wanted to be pushed and confronted and hurt.

But at the end of each semester I got: A Big Tick.

I gave up on university creative writing classes after a few subjects.

My writing habits varied enormously over the next ten years. In undergrad I wrote masses of poetry and letters and essays and mated flies and inoculated agar plates and finished my BA and BSc degrees. I didn’t eat much and I didn’t sleep much and was probably a bit nuts a lot of the time.

Then I quit English/Philosophy Honours after a month, graduated with what I had and studied for a library degree full time (night classes) while also working nearly full-time during the day. Assignments (and – kill me now – group assignments) were done very early in the morning and all weekend. This is not recommended. My husband will attest to my sleep-walking and talking at this time. I graduated.

Then I stopped reading, and only worked and watched films. Think I was a wee bit burnt out.

Then I worked and read and the only writing I did was book reviews and I'd accepted I probably wasn’t going to write creatively ever again. This lasted a very long time. Every now and then I’d force a poem out from between the cracks, because that was what I was supposed to be doing. But mostly I edited up my old stuff and that was the stuff (some of it 10 years old) I was submitting to journals. It felt horrible and I felt useless and if anyone tried to talk to me about creative writing I got defensive and pretended it didn’t matter to me. Did it fuck.

Then I got wonderfully, deliberately pregnant, had a baby, and what happened in that following year was…hmm? What? Can you hang out the washing? I’ve just been pooed on.

Then as my kid got older I read more, reviewed and judged writing awards more. I was busy. I didn’t write much poetry, and I didn’t write any fiction and I kept pretending it didn’t matter.

Then everything went to complete and utter shit for over a year and I went a bit nuts and didn’t eat or sleep but I wrote more than 200 poems and over 80,000 words worth of stories in 6 months. Don’t try this at home. Seriously. It means you’re mental.

Now I'm just trying to keep writing because I think if I stop I might never start again.

Conclusion: I tend to be all, or bugger all. How I do one thing is how I do everything.

But I did in the end learn something from writing classes at uni. I learned that I want there to be different streams of classes, to cater for different needs. It would have made me feel a bit less mental, then and now. In my pretty dream uni (where the coffee is free and Union House doesn’t smell like dead fish and feet), there would be one creative writing stream for people who want encouragement, gentle constructive pointers, and to have the good things they do firmly acknowledged.

And there would be a second stream for those who want the extreme version – the all or bugger all. To be let loose to argue and criticise without fear of slamming their feet into the kidneys of someone’s dream-child. To get into the messy details and debate single words in single sentences, and be able to say, essentially: This bit is awesome, this bit is parmesan-style vomit-shaker.

And it would be clear-cut – you’d volunteer for your stream, not be assigned. Tick a box, choose your crits.

I don’t actually think either stream is ‘better’, by the way. I hate the idea that being able to ‘take’ criticism is an indication of strength or superiority. Some writers don’t read reviews because they write better without them. Some writers do read reviews because they write better with them. If some form of counsel helps your improve or makes you want to improve your writing, then it works. If whatever it is doesn’t help: screw it. Ignore it. Avoid it.

But in terms of creative writing classes, the cautious and nice approach doesn’t work for everyone, just like cheese doesn’t always make an appropriate analogy for writing. (I initially was going to link my cheese imagery to how marking at Melbourne Uni was done on the bell curve, but then I looked at the words ‘cheese’ and ‘bell curve’ in the same sentence and decided against it.)

I’m not completely inhuman; I do like praise. I like a big fat tick on my assignment as much as the next scribbler. But I like it explained, or not at all.

Is it a Roquefort tick?

Or a Tasmanian Heritage camembert tick?

Or a tick that means “just put that vomitous parmesan-style shaker back in the cupboard”?

The highest form of blogging

In this blog post, I will not do at least two things*.

1. I will not have my novel-in-progress assessed by a feline editor.
2. I will not fall backwards off anything.

It's true, consultation is the wryest form of cattery, and propellation the spryest form of battery. But by not doing at least both of these two things, it will become obvious that I am not copying anyone's comedy stylings.

Why yes, I did give up caffeine two months ago. What of it? It wasn't agreeing with me. And that awkward moment in the staff toilets was pure coincidence. This music is Bulgarian, by the way, not Georgian. What next? Am I still allowed to make sandwiches and drink arbitrarily feminised varieties of tea? Why am I defending myself to you anyway? You're a cat, and touching my stuff with your bum doesn't constitute editing.

I stop writing blog posts to my cat in order to have a shower. I’ve just taken my pyjamas off when there’s a knock at the door. It’s not the tv repair man because he came yesterday, eventually. So it’s going to be Paul, having forgotten his keys. I reach for a modesty-towel from the cupboard, and remember they’re all in the tumble drier because we only own three towels and usually that’s four towels too few for my washing regime.

The venetian blinds are still shut in the lounge. I trot naked to the front door, execute an elegant triple-step to avoid a particularly vicious-looking block of Duplo and impale my instep on a small plastic goat that I swear wasn’t there a second ago. I notify the plastic goat that it is, in fact, an arsehole, and wrench open the front door to give Paul his keys.

It’s the postman. He looks bored.

I slam the door shut again and shout “JUST A MINUTE!”

The only appropriately voluminous garment within reach is an embroidered kimono that I’m selling for my aunt on eBay. I shove my arms into the sleeves and wrap it around my body.

I open the front door again. The postman still looks bored.

“Sorry,” I say, “I was thinking about my husband. I mean, I thought you were my husband.”

"Sign at the top, please."

I pause, pen above paper. I have forgotten how to do my signature. I scrawl something with a few too many double-consonants in it across the form, and take my package. The postman fades out onto the footpath.

The package is puffy and soft, and I wonder what I ordered online the last time I was pre-menstrual and watching Dead Poets Society at 2am. I plonk down on the floor in my beautifully stitched kimono and strip off the wrapping.

It’s a set of towels.

My cat pauses mid arse-lick in the cello position and stares calmly at me.

"Stop it. This is fine," I say. "You can't copy an indirect presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression and the context in which it occurs. Irony is a widely used device.”

My cat finishes his editorial ablutions and jumps down from the desk. He sniffs the pile of new towels on the floor and then makes a pointed attempt to sit down on my bare foot. Despite his demonstrated high standards of anal hygiene, I'm not keen to risk having my bare toes critiqued.

So I stand up, take a step back onto a well-placed Matchbox car, perform a devastating somersault over the coffee table, and resolve to seriously reconsider the introduction to this post.

*My very funny friend Mat Larkin has a very funny blog. Parts of this post may or may not be directly related or stolen from his writing in the past, present and future.

Reading 'Wasted': Yes. Fucking yes.

Reading Wasted is like being belted over the head.

Marya Hornbacher's 1998 memoir of her anorexia and bulimia (written when she was just 23) has been much criticised for its triggering nature and unresolved, bleak ending. Which is fair enough, on one hand. It does have huge triggering potential. There are startling amounts of research and theory pulsing through Hornbacher's writing, along with descriptions of her personal experiences that are magnetic, raw and deranged. It's a seductive and mesmerising combination of factors - the academic and the mad, and she was obviously still unwell when she wrote it. Reading Wasted draws you in so close to Marya that it does make you feel pretty nuts, so if you're already a bit nuts, proceed with care.

But I'm not intending to enter the debate about whether Wasted 'should' ever have been published. It was published, it still is being published. People can choose what they read, choose to stop reading. People in recovery know what triggers they need to avoid. And not every book has to have a happy ending.

Moving on.

Wasted veers between vicious honesty, articulate introspection and self-indulgent ranting. The belted-over-the-head factor for me in this book comes from many things Hornbacher says that I haven't had the words to express, or that I haven't even thought of. Things you don't read in the Standard Government-Issue Pamphlets On Eating Disorders, and things that struck with with their truth (their truth for me, personally).

Sometimes it doesn't occur to me that the DSM-IV-TR might not be a comprehensive account of these conditions (although the very inclusion of EDNOS should be a tip-off that eating disorders are that easily defined, yeah?). The value of this book for me is pointing at a paragraph and just thinking "Yes. Fucking yes."

I've folded so many corners down in this book it's starting to fan out at the bottom. Rather than ramble on, I'm going to share a few corners. I don't think they're particularly triggery passages, but that's only going on my subjective appraisal.

"The bragging was the worst. I hear this in schools all over the country, in cafes and resaturants, in bars, on the internet, for Pete's sake, on buses, on sidewalks: Women yammering about how little they eat. Oh, I've starving, I haven't eaten all day, I think I'll have a great big piece of lettuce, I'm not hungry, I don't like to eat in the morning (in the afternoon, in the evening, on Tuesdays, when my nails aren't painted when my shin hurts, when it's raining, when it's sunny, on national holidays, after or before 2am). I heard it in the hospital, that terrible ironic whine from the chapped lips of women starving to death. But I'm not hun-greeeee. To hear women tell it, we're never hungry. We live on little Ms. Pac-Man power pellets. Food makes us queasy, food makes us itchy, food is too messy, all I really like to eat is celery. To hear women tell it, we're ethereal beings who eat with the greatest distaste scraping scraps of food between out teeth with our upper lips curled.

For your edification, it's bullshit.

Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times...My generation and the last one feign disinterest in food. We are 'too busy' to eat, 'too stressed' to eat. Not eating, in some way, signifies that you have a life so full, that your busy-ness is so important, that food would be an imposition on your precious time. We claim a loss of appetite, a most-sacred aphysicality, superwomen who have conquered the feminine realm of the material and finally gained access to the masculine realm of the mind."

Yes.

"This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and you hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don't really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you. But at this stage, when it is effectively Over, is haunting in its own way...This is the pitiful stage where you do not qualify as an eating-disordered person. And you feel bad about this. You feel as if you really ought to count, you ought to still merit worry, still have the power to summon a flurry of nurses, their disdain ill hidden, your skeletal smirk.

But you are in the present tense. Your husband sips his coffee, saying, But dear, I don't really care if you've gained weight. And you, triumphant, logical as the Red Queen, shriek, You see? I have gained weight! I knew it! And he sighs. You ask again, Do I look fat? No. Plump? No. Round? Well you're a woman. What do you mean? I mean - I mean -

I picture husbands all over the world, hovering in doorways, caught in a terrible tangle of language, feet and hands bound by these slippery words glossy and meaningless as the pages of a magazine."

Yes.

"I should've known better, I should've called myself on all the lies I was telling myself - I'm eating enough, I'm doing all right, I'm healthy. I was happy. I had learned, or thought that I'd learned, that I was a valuable person. I understood that I needed to eat to live, and I wanted to live. I said to myself: It takes time, it's not that easy, you can't expect yourself to be perfect this soon. There are altogether too many 'empowering' things that professionals tell you that can be twisted around and turned against yourself. I had heard a few too many times that if I threw up, it was just a 'slip', if I stopped eating for a little while it didn't really mean I was relapsing. How long is a little while? It stretches out, one week, two weeks, three, and you're back where you started. Professionals give anorectics and bulimics way too much credit for having their brains in order: You have to be patient with yourself, they said, you have to be nurturing to yourself, be nice to yourself. And so, as I went through another day without food...I said to myself: I have to be patient, I'm being nurturing to myself by not expecting too much of myself, I will not push myself too hard today, so I guess we'll just have some coffee for lunch...
We all do this. I've never met an eating-disordered person who could not come up with an astonishing battalion of solid-sounding, intellectualized reasons why they can't eat."

Yes.

"Did my family set it off again? Did my father's neediness and my fear of it spark relapse? My mother's distance? An article I read? A woman I saw? Not likely. What happened is that, faced with a number of things in my life that I didn't like, I turned to my eating disorder because I had never, ever figured out how to fucking deal."

Yes.

"I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense, pretty much. People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers - everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it's actually just how you think. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any."

Yes.

It was also very pleasing to hear my opinion on the therapist-worshipping 1980s YA novel The Best Little Girl in the World echoed: "It is in fact a rather romanticized account, written by a doctor intent upon demonstrating not the experience of having an eating disorder but rather his own genius in curing them."

Yes. Fucking yes.

"youre carrying it inside you" - Riddley Walker

"The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say, 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no mor its inside you."

I've just this minute finished reading Riddley Walker and it's astonishing (also, how did anyone read it before LOLspeak was invented?). It's perfect to read after reading Margo Lanagan, for some reason - she's like a mythological primer for Hoban's creation.

You don't read this book in the usual way (as you can probably tell from the quote above). You apprehend it, you hear it. It takes a degree of relaxation of your mind. It demands to be read for hours at a time, not pages. It's not a book you can read with your eye half on Twitter or your child or your lunch.

And it's completely worth the effort, the reservation of your hours, and the displacement of how you usually read.

Melbourne By Dusk

Melbourne By Dusk is an excellent project that was started by David Witteveen and Angelica East as part of the Emerging Writer's Festival this year.

"Melbourne by Dusk mixes photography and flash fiction to explore the overlap between our city and our imagination.

(Flash fiction is just a fancy term for really, really short stories.)

It is part of the 2011 Emerging Writer’s Festival.

WHAT IS IT?
Our core idea was to take a photo of something real in Melbourne, and then write an urban fantasy story that riffs off the picture.

Here’s what you can submit:

A PHOTO for David to write a story about.

A STORY. These can be inspired by the “seed” photos we put up. Or they can be your own stories that Angelica can then take photos for.

Stories should be 20-200 words, and urban fantasy/weird/surreal. (Include the Seed Number, if any, so we can match them up.)

YOUR OWN PHOTO/STORY combination. (Again, 20-200 word stories, urban fantasy, etc.)

SOMETHING ELSE that meets the theme - music, poetry, video, quotes, artwork…"

This was my effort - a flash poem (if that's a thing) about a photo of Flinders Street Station.

Go forth and submit your own!

The importance of tea (or; why I love McCall Smith's online novels)

“He had filled his days doing ordinary, unexceptional things and thought nothing of them. But they were far from nothing: even the act of making his morning cup of tea as he looked, bleary-eyed over the rooftops of Pimlico amounted to a small miracle: that there should, in this cold void of space, be a small blue planet on which he, a rather complex collection of cells, should be delighting in the dried black leaves of a plant that grew half a world away; that surely was astonishing and worthy of celebration and awe.”

- from A Conspiracy of Friends: A Corduroy Mansions Novel by Alexander McCall Smith

"You speak the truth...You think it is easy?" Some thoughts on 'A Monster Calls' by Patrick Ness

"The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming... The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth."

Like many people will, I read Patrick Ness' new book A Monster Calls in an afternoon and cried solidly for a few hours afterwards. It was sometimes so emotionally difficult to read, at several points I didn't know if I could finish it.

Initially, I couldn't quite find the words to say why this book hit me so hard, and all I could do was applaud its clarity of expression, honesty of emotion, delicacy of metaphor and the beautifully placed illustrations that gave me goosebumps especially the surprise of each full-page spread.

Aren't they stunning?

I think my reaction to this book is partly to do with an important idea to me: of children (and anyone, really) being allowed to be angry, and for that anger to be valid and true. An okay thing to feel. It's why I've always loved Where The Wild Things Are as well.

In A Monster Calls, Conor deals with his anger by trying to be invisible and capable. He hides his anger from everyone (including himself) until it bursts out of him as a (literally) destructive force. When he lets his monster out and lets himself be visible, then he has to face it and find ways to deal with it, and to deal with the truth of his anger.

There are truths we hide, from each other and from ourselves, because they feel like they hurt everyone too much. They're not fair.

"Many things that are true feel like a cheat. Kingdoms get the princes they deserve, farmers' daughters die for no reason, and sometimes witches merit saving."

Truths make you angry as hell, they make you beat up the bathroom. As Conor's mum says, everyone should be allowed to be "as angry as you need to be...And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard." But once you've broken things, you own the destruction. And you have to acknowledge what you've let out, and believe it.

"Belief is half of all healing."

Belief hurts, truth hurts, healing hurts. Which is all very unfair, but as the monster simply puts it: "humans are complicated beasts." Our minds are much happier believing "comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both."

Truth sucks. It just happens, unfortunately, to be necessary.

These thoughts are confused in my head, but I thought I'd write them down anyway, before I lose them or doubt them any further. You know, the "maybe I've got this all completely wrong and I'm the only one who thinks this and anyway this is far too dramatic to be posting" feeling you get when you write blog entries sometimes? That.

One thing I'm sure of is that I want to thank Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd for the gift of their story, and Jim Kay for his amazing illustrations.

"Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth."

Baa Baa Black Sheep

Luka is nearly 2 and a half now. When did that happen? I must have been asleep. Oh wait, no I wasn't most of the time.

His book-reading methods are *somewhat* different from the first time I posted a photo, and the last time I posted a video, so I thought it was time for an update:

Discovering which songs Luka knows from daycare has been really cute. Yesterday's discovery was Baa Baa Black Sheep, via a new book of nursery rhymes.

I can't wait til he's old enough to make up stories, so I can steal all his ideas.

Reading Matters 2011

There've been lots of wrap posts about the Reading Matters conference (a biennial YA literature conference run by the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria) written over the last few days, and I felt like I should do one too.

Mine's a bit different, though. Throughout the conference, lots of people were tweeting about the conference under the hastag #RM11. So I've collected a bunch of those tweets, and chopped them about to make a poem.

Tweets used are from @msmisrule, @twitofalili, @SLVLearn, @annaryanpunch (yeah that's me), @bookboy, @Zoe_Walton, @mike_sh, @timpegler.

__________________________________________

#RM11

I love the smell of librarians in the morning.

rival gangs of verbose bookish miscreants roaming

Police should be alert for the inner city landscape

not so much black tie as black cardi.

How to tell if you are a writer:

Do you have a set of bizarre interests?

Are you bisexual? Can I have some of your blood?

Are you interested in planking?

Superheroes wrote their own comic books,

seeing what we take for granted

anew like childhood views of power stations

beautiful by night, straightforward and utterly baffling.

Everything relates to Buffy, this is clear.

Girls write themselves, damsels need

discussion that involves the phrase "sausage-fest"

not princess fairy kitten and the glitter horse stickers.

Every family has their own terminology

how they respond is what’s important.

I've heard the term 'cultural melting-pot' a lot

it’s natural to want to see outside that.

Readers will never come last in the race,

never quite know the extraordinary journey.

We owe everything to a roomful of books:

strong, flawed and not having to be rescued.

Mascara Literary Review

I'm very pleased to have a couple of poems and a review published in the new issue of Mascara Literary Review. It's my first try at reviewing a poetry collection, so I spent far too much time on it. Hopefully my careful reading and re-reading has done it and the poet justice!

I rather like having things published in online journals (especially online journals who pay you in cold hard cash. Well, glowing electronic cash, actually, but you get the point).

Joining me in issue 8 are poets Anthony Lawrence, Michele Leggott, Andy Kissane, Marlene Marburg, Ashley Capes, Ali Jane Smith, Nicholas YB Wong, Mal McKimmie, Margaret Bradstock, rob walker, Jennifer Compton, Judith Beveridge, Sue Lockwood, Anis Shivani, Brook Emery, Philip Hammial, Aidan Coleman, Sam Byfield, Tricia Dearborn, Peter Lach-Newinsky, Desh Balasubramaniam, Michael Sharkey, Alan Pejković, Jo Langdon and Sridala Swami.

Submissions to Mascara's special poetry issue are now open until September - prose poets, sharpen your pens!

Re-reading Xaipe by e.e. cummings

I originally posted this over at Goodreads, but thought I'd post my waffling on here too, to make up for the sudden dearth of blogging!

e.e. cummings has been my favourite poet since high school. I carry a 'selected poems' around in my handbag (for emergencies), but it's always interesting to revisit a whole book, rather than just what someone else thought was a 'best of'. You get standout poems that don't make it into other collections, alongside lesser ones. Xaipe (pronounced "Khai-er-ree" to rhyme with 'fiery') means 'rejoice' in Greek, and the collection is often movingly joyous.

Cummings sometimes gets accused of being sentimental, deliberately impossible to read, and even casually racist. I can see how he could be read thus.

But I think his playfulness rescues him from sentimentality (I adore his poems about children):

if a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit


(holding a red candle over his head
by a finger of trunk,and singing out of a red

book)on a proud round cloud in a white high night


where his heartlike ears have flown adorable him
self tail and all(and his tail's red christmas bow)
--and if,when we meet again,little he(having flown
even higher)is sunning his penguinsoul in the glow


of a joy which wasn't and isn't and won't be words


while possibly not(at a guess)quite half way down
to the earth are leapandswooping tinily birds
whose magical gaiety makes your beautiful name--


i feel that(false and true are merely to know)
Love only has ever been,is,and will ever be,So


His impossibility - shredded/recombined words and absurd punctuation litters his poems - suits the way I read poetry. I just read it headlong, straight through the first time, not pausing over words, punctuation or to try think or match up the parentheses. And interestingly when I go back for a second look, the image I've got the first time around usually still stands up. Try it yourself:

the little horse is newlY


Born)he knows nothing,and feels
everything;all around whom is


perfectly a strange
ness(Of sun
light and of fragrance and of


Singing)is ev
erywhere(a welcom
ing dream:is amazing)
a worlD.and in


this world lies:smoothbeautifuL
ly folded;a(brea
thing a gro


Wing)silence,who;
is:somE


oNe.

Cummings himself responded to the racist controversy (mainly around his line "a kike is the most dangerous") in typically cryptic fashion:

'Cummings' "Good American point," as he told Allen Tate, was "that the kike isn't(helas) a Jew..." (but is an invention of Gentile society).' (quote from the inner flyleaf of Xaipe).

I loved revisiting Xaipe. It's flawed and joyous and sometimes extremely funny:

o to be in finland
now that russia's here)


swing low
sweet ca


rr
yon


(pass the freedoms pappy or
uncle shylock not interested

Additionally, when I re-read it, a copy of poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that I had been trying to remember for ages (When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story) fell out - I'd been using it as a bookmark! Brilliant.

And the winner is...

...Kirsty Eagar for Raw Blue! Yep, that's the book we all held up.

Woot!

The awards dinner was held last night, and was made spectacularly enjoyable by MC Casey Bennetto - I strongly believe all awards ceremonies should be presented in musical theatre form (especially as the introduction to the award for a First Book of History included the line "She didn't think the colon vital, she didn't pick a compound title"). There was also some amusing cross-room tweeted arguments about which of us was on the kids' table (I reckoned it was us, but was told: "Nup. Bloggers and cartoonists and plus ones on table 4 is kids table.") And then, there was FOOOOOOD:

Kirsty was there to collect her award, and gets extra points for mentioning the awards had been "tantalizingly blogged about". From now on my bio will read "Anna Ryan-Punch: tantalizing blogger."

It is a real thrill to give the award to this fantastic and assured first novel - the quality and polish of writing in Raw Blue is astonishing, as is the sophistication of structure (see, I mentioned structure!) and verisimilitude of the characters. Even the marginal characters and smallest details in Raw Blue never really leave you - for me, hollandaise sauce will never be quite the same.

It's a brilliant whack-in-the-face of a novel, and I urge you all to go out and buy it if you haven't already.

Oh, and the rumours about the dessert buffet at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards are true. Just in case you were wondering.

Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2010 shortlists are announced!

And the books shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards YA Prize are:

• Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar


• Swerve by Phillip Gwynne


• Beatle Meets Destiny by Gabrielle Williams

Phew. I don't have to keep my mouth shut any more! Except about the winner, of course, but that's easier somehow. It's just a cosy little one-book secret, rather than a big rambling three-book secret. I think my secret limit is two books.

Big congratulations to all the shortlisted authors - I'm extremely proud and excited about our shortlist. And also congrats to the authors we longlisted: Kirsty Murray for Vulture's Gate, Richard Harland for Worldshaker and Bill Condon for Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God. You can read the judges' reports here.

Judging this year was a completely different experience to the 2007 VPLA - which makes sense I suppose, given that you have a completely different set of entries for the year, and a completely different set of judges. (Except me. I am not completely different.) One important difference was that we didn't have to write a judge bio for the website, or provide a photo. Which absolved me from the photo-choosing despair that I encountered last time! I was going to go with this one, in case you're interested:

Myself and my fellow judges (Pam Macintyre from Viewpoint Magazine and Leesa Lambert from The Little Bookroom) used the same judging process as the last time I was a judge - once the entries were received we all squirrelled ourselves away and read like the blazes, and we each created our own personal longlists for our next meeting. We kept our longlists a secret from each other until the meeting, to see if there would be any overlap.

In 2008, when I judged the award with lovely authors Kirsty Murray and Simmone Howell, our initial personal longlists had very little overlap, which I found fascinating. So there was lots of re-reading and re-evaluating done after our initial read-through. Our final shortlist and winner were arrived at through a lot of analysis, a lot of brain-wracking, a few more meetings, and a bit of voting.

I expected pretty much the same turn of events this year - when you give three different people a pile of 75 different books and ask them to pick the best ones, you'd assume you'd get some different answers.

So Pam and I turned up at the Little Bookroom on Longlist Meeting Day with our little piles of novels hidden in our bags.

I produced my longlist first. Then Pam produced hers. Then Leesa pulled out hers.

Each of our 4-book longlists overlapped by at least 3 books. Wow.

"So," Pam said, "Which one do we think is the winner?"

And we all held up the same book.

Then we kind of got the giggles, because it was so unexpected, and so exciting! We were unanimous before we'd even opened our mouths!

Narrowing down the rest of the shortlist took a bit longer - a bit of re-reading and discussing and voting, but given that we already had a three-book overlap in our longlists it didn't take too long.

So: a different year, a different set of entries and judges, a completely different judging experience. Last time I was pregnant, this time I have an 18mth old. Both years it has been exciting, confusing, and brain-tearingly full on. So has the judging.

I can't imagine what will happen if I judge this award again in the future. Probably I'll just have given birth to triplets, we judges will have a shortlist of twenty books that we CANNOT cut down any further, our heads will explode and someone else will have to judge the award for us.

Oh, and did I forget to tell you this year's winner? How terribly remiss of me.

1.38 metres of reading

I received the complete lot of books for judging today. 70 entries, 7 weeks til The Decision is due.

Luka very kindly helped me unpack the books:

I've judged this award once before, and I remember the stack of books was pretty tall, but I don't remember it being THIS TALL:

It's 138cm of books. Yes, I'm in my pyjamas. It's 7pm, aren't you in your pyjamas?

I'm also 179cm tall, which is pretty tall for a woman (or a man for that matter, but even more so for a woman) so having a stack of books come up past my boobs is kind of scary. Some of my friends only come up to my boobs. I'm not scared of them, though. That's different.

Looking back, in 2008 the stack was this tall:

I was about 3 weeks pregnant there, though I didn't know it yet. Aw.

There were 65 entries that year. Though there are only 5 more entries this year, it feels like a big difference in stack height.

Oh hey, but I'm wearing the same socks today!

Are books getting longer? Am I getting shorter? Can I get through 70 books in the next 7 weeks?

There once was a man from Nantucket (or, Why I love limericks)

As some of you know, I write poetry. So I would like to tell you about my most favourite, no competition, above-all-rubies sort of poem.

The limerick.

I love limericks. There, I've said it. I'd rather read a good limerick than a good sonnet. That bastion of information (Wikipedia), says the limerick is "sometimes obscene, with humorous intent."

(I think I'd like that on my gravestone. "Here lies Anna Ryan-Punch. She was sometimes obscene, with humorous intent.")

The reason they're known as 'limericks' is the source of a bit of debate, but most sources say it's because they fit into a song, the chorus of which begins 'Oh won't you come up to Limerick', and any limerick slots into the verse tune. (When I was a kid we sang limericks to a similar sort of song, where the chorus encouraged: "So sing me another verse that's worse than the first verse, make sure that it's foolish and silly.") As you all know, the limerick is a 5-line rhyming stanza (aabba) written in anapestic or amphibrachic metre.

There. Educational part of the blog concluded.

Limericks are funny, mostly naughty, rhyming poems. What's not to love? Well, apparently some people don't like them. When I professed my love of limericks to my fellow librarian Alana, she said: "But they're lame, and they're always rude." She's probably right. I think this is why I like them. They appeal to my love of bad puns:

'I must leave here,' said Lady De Vere,

'For these damp airs don't suit me, I fear.'

Said her friend: 'Goodness me!

If they don't agree

With your system, why eat pears, my dear?'

(Anon)

They appeal to my love of swearing:

There was a young man of Nepal

Who had a mathematical ball;

The cube of it's weight

Times Pi, minus eight

Is four thirds the root of fuck all.

(Anon)

They often poke fun at figures political, literary and academic. Being married to a philosopher (and in having majored in philosophy at uni in a past life), among my favourites are the ones that poke fun at philosophers:

An example of Kant's sterling wit

Was his theory that farts could be lit,

And it's said that all night

By the flickering light,

He composed his 'Critique of Pure Shit'.

(Victor Gray)

This one is obviously a firm fave in our household (especially when needing to bitch about academia):

When a man's too old even to toss off, he

Can sometimes be consoled by philosophy.

One frequently shows a

Strong taste for Spinoza

When one's balls are beginning to ossify.

(Robert Conquest)

I'm not a big fan of the Edward Lear limericks (the ones that end with pretty much the same line they started with, and aren't rude, and as a result of both these things, aren't funny):

There was an Old Man in a tree,

Who was horribly stung by a bee;

When they said: 'Does it buzz?'

He replied: 'Yes it does.

It's a regular brute of a bee!

(Edward Lear)

See? Yawn. But there's a reply to this limerick of his that I find absurdly funny:

There was an old man of St Bees

Who was horribly stung by a wasp.

When they said: 'Does it hurt?'

He replied: 'No it doesn't -

It's a good job it wasn't a hornet!'

(Sir William S. Gilbert)

I love this. It's poking fun at how Lear's limerick is so lame, but even when I didn't know it was a reply to Lear, I still thought it was hilarious. It gets recited often at our family gatherings (which gives you an idea of how I came to be the person I am today).

There are people who are even more into limericks than me. The OEDILF (The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form) project aims to write one limerick on the subject of every single word in the English language. No joke. So far they've got 61786 'approved' limericks. I'm not sure of the details of the approval process, but I'm sure it's very rigorous.

Scholar of rudey humour Gershon Legman maintained that the true limerick is always obscene. But in case you think I am a bawdy old wench who just likes to make jokes about balls and boobs all day (you can lead a horticulture, etc.), I also love those rare limericks that manage to be delightful without being rude at all:

A psychiatrist fellow from Rye

Went to visit another close by,

Who said, with a grin,

As he welcomed him in:

'Hullo, Smith! You're all right! How am I?'

(Stephen Cass)

A combustible woman from Thang

Exploded one day with a BANG!

The maid then rushed in,

And said with a grin,

'Pardon me Madam - you rang?'

(Spike Milligan)

A wonderful bird is the pelican

His bill can hold more than his belican.

He can take in his beak

Food enough for a week

But I'm damned if I see how the helican.

(Dixon Merritt)

One of my favourite books of poetry that I used to nick off my mum's bookshelf is the Penguin Book of Limericks (ed. E.O. Parrott). It is now housed on my bookshelves between Ovid and Rilke (which is funny in itself). I probably wasn't really supposed to be reading it (given that it contains more sex and swearing than Deadwood and True Blood combined) but I thought it was great. I loved how the rhythm and rhyme scheme of limericks made me laugh even if they weren't terribly funny or I didn't really get it, and how the really good ones can still make me cry laughing. And I suspect that that the randy old Dean at Harvard was right:

At Harvard a randy old Dean

Said: 'The funniest jokes are obscene.

To bowdlerize wit

Takes the shit out of it -

Who wants a limerick clean?

(Anon)