Nerves

I had to give a talk this morning.

It was to explain something about work that I've done for longer than I can care to say to people from other countries.

I do this fairly often.

I've known about this one since before Christmas.

Since late January, in fact since the day after the last talk I gave, I've woken up at 3:00am worried about it at least twice a week.

This morning I walked across the road without noticing a car turning into the street. I think my mind thought I wouldn't have to give a talk if I was in hospital or the morgue.

Over the past week it's also tried to persuade me I'm suffering the followign ailments and should stay home instead of giving this talk:
pneumonia
whooping cough
tonsillitis
anaemia
possible heart attack
Parkinsons
non-Hodgkins lymphoma
leukaemia
scurvy
gum disease
arthritis
muscular degenerative disease and
Alzheimers

Of course, now it's over I feel great!

In other news

We dragged our three-year-old to the W League grand final last Saturday.

Between complaints, she ignored the football and watched a DVD.

It rained.

We all got wet.

Our team lost.

But it was really good to see that, unlike last year, they packed the suit for the strangely disturbing piggytailed girl Sydney Football Club mascot, Sydnee, instead of the boy (called Syd).

Someone was thinking!

Maybe this was why unlike last year my daughter didn't stalk the mascot for most of the game, demanding hugs and pushing other kids away until I reached the point of utter mortification and carried her to the other end of the stand. I'm sure it's nothing to do with her being a year older...

She's a what, now?

This is how the Daily Telegraph chose to caption its otherwise perfectly reasonable article about a brutal attack on a distinguished and highly experienced foreign correspondent for a major US network station during the recent troubles in Egypt.

Dumbfounded really.

The September Issue

Mr Andrew Riemer
Chief Book Reviewer
Sydney Morning Herald


Dear Mr Riemer

Thank you for many hours of enjoyment over the years of reading your thoughtful and erudite reviews. This week-end's review of the Best Australian Essays 2010
was particularly helpful, especially for its comment:

The only disappointment amongst these frequently anthologised writes is so and so's pretentious and condescending demolition of the Minogue sisters. I wonderered: why bother?

This article was orginially published in The Monthly magazine.

I've subscribed to this magazine since it was launched, not without mixed feelings as it has sometimes lost its way and changed editors with great chaos last year. Its fiction selections are very uneven and its poetry choice is woeful but its long essays on politics and crime are often really good and Robert Forster's music reviews are usually the best thing in it.

I had a single issue left on my current subscription after the September issue. The pointless over-long article on the Minogues was enough for me to resolve not to renew. Then of course the October issue was really good so I changed my mind.

Your review made me realise I wasn't alone in disliking this article.

In answer to your question, I think the new young gun editor trying to attract new readers from newstand browsers with his cover.

I'm surprised Rhianna isn't on the current issue.

Yours sincerely

Mary

The Illywacker challenge

Finished!!

Finally!

And do I feel better?

Is there a sense of achievement that I can cross Illywacker off my list after four long weeks of not enjoying reading?

Well no actually.

And knowing the ending - which was actually the bit before the ending - didn't ruin it because well I didn't care at all by then.

Scrivener Avril Rolfe reminded me last week that part of this could be that he's not really that nice to his female characters. Or apparently, to his ex-wife.

I might go and read something sweet, lighthearted and life-affirming now. Back soon.

Illywacked

A long time ago, probably not long after it was published in 1985, I overhead my mother telling my father what happened at the end of Peter Carey's novel Illywhacker.

I was cross because I'd wanted to read it and at that stage still thought that there was no point in starting a novel if you knew the ending.

Now I can't quite remember what she said so I thought I should give it a go when a copy turned up at home. After all I've read most of his other novels and some of his stories and essays and usually found his work interesting and funny if a bit disturbing in places (I mean The Tax Inspector was just a bit too icky in ways I don't like to think about even now).

But I can still remember enough of her description of what happened to look for clues to see how we're going to get there from here or here or here.

I'm wondering if this is why I'm reading it far slower than usual. After three weeks I'm only two-thirds of the way through its 600 pages.

It's not like the prose is any less engaging to that in the books of his that kept me reading all night. He has a lovely way of putting words together but this is the first one of his that I've been able to put down. And not just once. Every day on my bus ride, I've got up to something I don't want to read and just

stopped.

This book won heaps of prizes and had great reviews but at a distance of two decades if you know how it turns out, it just seems to be trying too hard to reflect "Australianess" in a novel.

There's a broad sweep of historical events from the Gold Rush to the Depression (so far). There's heaps of geography with descriptions of Melbourne, Geelong, Sydney and dozens of small towns from South Australia into south-east Queensland. (Maybe he'll get to WA). There's the "national character" of larrikinism compared to the experience of migrants from Europe and Asia. The lives of country folk and would-be communists are compared to the bourgeois and bohemian. There's drought (haven't got to flooding rains yet but there's time), There's exploitation of fauna and aknowledgement of the land belonging to the as yet invisible indigenous peoples. There's even a child lost in the bush.

So it just feels a bit like he was ticking the boxes of what used be called the Great Australian Novel.

I hope I change my mind by the end.

That's better

I've been a bit shall we say critical about how women's sport, particularly the so-called W-League football is promoted here and, more tragically, here.

This season I think they have different marketers.

Or maybe they've just given up trying to get blokes along to watch women play sport.

Either way, I'm pleased that my three-year-old is getting emails from girlsfc every week because there's nothing remotely resembling last year's OTT glamour photography.

I don't even mind the "girl" business because it's meant to be for kids.

Well done!