I think I might like this book

Last night I started to read Alex Jones's Helen Garner and the Meaning of Everything . It's about a retired academic of literary studies pondering life while reading the books of Helen Garner.

This is an odd choice, firstly, because the only book of Garner's I've ever read was Monkey Grip a really long time ago. I was 18 and, of course, I knew everything about life and love and most of the time I was reading the book I wished I could just SHAKE the central charater for being so utterly HOPELESS about men. And, secondly, I spent yesterday whimpering in bed with the sort of cold where you need to sleep for 18 hours and can barely remember your own name much less follow complex things like the news or books about other books you haven't read.

And this is a complex book. I mean it has appendices! And endnotes! Endnotes in a novel! Moreover, endnotes well worth reading because they're not just references but comments!

So I am a bit surprised to find how much I'm enjoying it.

Well, so far, of course.

On the bus this morning I giggled out loud and disturbed my neighbour mid-application of lipliner when I found this on page 35 where the protagonist (the Dreamer) is advising Poppy, a high school student with a much older friend who may or may not be a boyfriend, about studying:

At last we came to English. Polly's class were reading a number of novels. Rita had bought copies of them, and Poppy produced them now - a low, uneven stack of mulitcoloured covers reflected in the glass of the coffee table. Uppermost in the pile was The Great Fire.* I put my finger on it.
'I'd start with this one,' I said, 'it should appeal to you. It's like Lolita retold as a Mills and Boon.

Now I LOVED Shirley' Hazzard's The Great Fire . I bought copies for at least two other people as gifts. But, it has to be admitted, it is about a love affair between a very young teenaged girl and a much older man and even worse, the ending was really really really contrived in a chocolate-boxy way and not really entirely credible. So, you know, I felt a bit bad about laughing because I was emotionally involved so I thought maybe this Alex Jones isn't such a nice man after all.

But THEN, I realised there's an endnote!

I flipped over to it.

It says:

Perhaps the Dreamer's unduly harsh judgement is coloured by his circumstances at this point.

So funny and not that mean after all! Hooray!!

Un-Australian?

It wasn't until after placing our order at the very welcome pub at the end of a three hour long walk through several suburbs that we realised that the Belgian-style pot of mussels with chips and mayonnaise and a glass of Hoegaarden weren't the most obvious things to have on Australia Day.

I blame the menu.

Cardigan wearers

The other day a mate at work was admiring my new black gossamer-thin tie-up garment that really can only be described as a cardigan.

Yes, I know it's summer but even if it's 36 degrees outside, it's still cool enough in our building for the finance sector types on other floors to wear their heavy suits with ties and cufflinks. This means that naked arms would spend most of the day covered in gooseflesh. (And no, I don't think whoever is in charge of the thermostat is thinking of the environment or their role in increasing the risk of global climatic disruption.) Hence, cardigan.

She pressed me for details of its cost and where I bought it.

I thought she was being polite.

But no.

Today she admitted that she'd rushed to the shop and bought three of them.

It's great to be a style icon but I'm not sure I want to be queen of the cardigan wearers.

There is a time for jargon

Apparently there was a big party in Washington today (link to every news site in the world not included for fear of breaking the interwebs again) where the new President made a "darkly sombre speech."

I thought it was good. Simple words, technical rhetorical things I don't know the terms for recalling the great American orators of the past and the Bible. About as far away from Our Kev's mangled buro-speak as you can get.

In fact it was almost worthy of Sam Seaborne.

Incidentally, I had a life imitating The West Wing moment the other day when reading about the real life 27-year-old speechwriter with "the uncanny ear for his master's voice" who's spent the last three months honing the inauguration address.

But I can't help thinking he maybe should have run this bit past the focus group - or even the real life Toby - one more time:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise healthcare's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Um

Soil? Fuel?

Huh?

I really don't get it.

Unless he means "Biofuel" but couldn't say that because it wasn't a word in Abe Lincoln's vocabulary.

Sounded good but.

That's how you do it!

I found this extremely jaunty and evocative image on the cover of a really dull report about the ineterwebs.

No, really don't bother reading it. I'm not sure why I linked to it.

But just look at that cable with the plastic connector-y thing. You can just tell it's dying to have a conversation with the shiny optical fibre-y things all lit up over there. Doesn't this make you think that communications are important?

Who needs butterflies to illustrate the internet?

Well done imaginative bureaucrats!

Or at least, well done imaginative graphic designer who resisted the urge to use wildlife and persuaded bureaucrats this was a good cover.

And then there were two

Remember this?


The W Leage Grand Final will be played in Brisbane on Saturday afternoon between Queensland Roar and Canberra United. (You can get your tickets here.)

This is how it's being advertised.


Spooky.

Oddly familiar.

And yet not quite the same.

Something is subtly different...

Oh and what's that strange bit of green in the hand of player in the orange shirt (Queensland)? Is it really from pulling the Canberra player out of a jump in the previous picture?

I guess they're doing their best to get their heads at the same height so they don't look like they're pre-empting the result.

Of course, I can't talk. My efforts would probably look something like this:

I like this book!

I read Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels a couple of months ago but can't really stop thinking about.

I picked it up in a shop because of the pretty cover (isn't it pretty?)

I almost put it down again because I didn't like the blurb:

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a gloriously told tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast.

Because, you know, ick. Sounds like 10,000 bad fantasy novels and hippy stuff.

I hestitated because there was a quote from Neil Gaiman saying it was the best book he's read for ages. Cool.

But then, I mean, I like him but he comes across as a terribly nice man who seems to be superenthusiastic about everyone he's ever met (the acknowledgements page of his most recent book made him sound particularly grateful to anyone who had bought him coffee).

So, on balance, I wasn't convinced I should buy it that day and I put it down.

But then I saw it in the library the following week and borrowed it without thinking.

And found I couldn't put it down. It has a fantastically imagined world where magic kind of works but it's really about women's lives and choices and adolescence and ageing and motherhood and love and and and...

It's the sort of book I wish I was in a lovely G&T drinking and chocolate quaffing book club where we could go "did you like this bit?" and "what did you think of this bit? Wasn't that clever?" rather than the snackless serious Alexander McCall Smith scoffing book club I'd join in the real world, if I was in fact a joiner.

Loved it. Gave a copy (not from the library) to my sister for Christmas and she loved it too. Hope it wins some of the prizes it's up for. Go Margo.

More nitpicking

I've spent most of the past day or so reading international policies on the realising the internet economy. Yawn.

I could have watched a podcast of a three day international meeting from six months ago if only I um why would anyone want to do that?

Only two things are keeping me awake:

Why do these people* think the web is about these







Rather than these:







And if cuteness is what they want, will they put some of these on their next report?



*Apparently I'm too much of a "digital migrant" to get bogger to upload include the actual picture that bothers me.

Ugh

Maybe it's just me.

Maybe because I've spent the past few weeks either "reading" the Little Einstein range on cats, dogs, babies and birds to a toddler or devouring grown up books with plots and characters and things, in short, not reading stuff that didn't go through three layers of public service editing before a minister's office sucked all the sense out of it, this seems worse than it is:

Australians are digitally aware and want to engage online. Many Australian businesses and individuals have realised the digital economy value proposition and embrace the benefits that the use of the internet and other technologies enable.

From here*

I think it means we like to use computers to do stuff.

I've only read it five times now.

Sorry if I ever write a paragraph as dodgy as that one.

*The same report taught me about "swivelling" which means making graphs and stuff from data. I'm not sure we needed a shiny new bit of jargon for that.

Not really outraged, just saying

Of course I got too busy with work and watching telly and reading other people's fabulous blogs for the last ten months to feel like posting here.

It's so much easier to be a consumer than a participant especially when other people say it so much better and sooner. Much much sooner....

But this image keeps turning up in my inbox attached to my Sydney Football Club (that's ahem the code formerly known as "soccer") update and it bothers me. So better late than never:



It's the promotional image for the new national women's football league - the "W League". This is being billed as a major step forward to have a semi-professional* national women's competition but I'm not sure which bright spark in PR thought this might help people to take women's sport seriously.

I mean, well, they look FABUOLOUS, all glossy bouncing hair and airbrushed make-up. Look how they're jumping for the ball!

But, well, how shall I put this? Has anyone ever tried to play sport with long hair hanging loose? I mean sports where you have to run and chase things like other players and balls - not yoga or chess.

It'd be really hard for them to avoid pulling each other's hair in a tackle.

Or maybe that's the point. It's probably designed to get adolescent boys to go along to matches.

I wonder what they think they get there and see


elite athletes running round playing footy.

Guess I should be grateful they're not wearing bikinis.

* All right, I just think they're paid. It's probably a nominal amount. Considering one of our best national players has recently retired because she can't make a livining from her sport, and the gate prices for the semi finals are a laughable $5 I don't think they can be getting much.