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).

Comin' over all judgemental

This year I was convenor of the
Premier's Literary Awards Young Adult Prize, which was a somewhat crazy amount of reading to attempt when you're suffering from morning sickness and pregnancy-related tiredness that requires sleep during all the times when I normally read (ie. on the train, during my lunch break, on the train, after dinner).

Yet somehow it was done! Now I have to find room for 65 extra books on my shelves. Although I probably don't need another copy of The Stone Key - anyone want one?

The shortlist was announced today. I think we chose good, go judging team. The winner (not tellin') will be announced on September 1st.

But more importantly, I had to choose a photo to put on my judge's bio - which I thought would be easy enough, until I discovered every recentish photo of me either stars me pulling faces:


or with a silly hat on:
or with bits of Paul's hair on my face:
Finally settled on this one (after cropping out the ubiquitous wine glass).

Phew.