Category Archives: Everything

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Dreams

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imaginarium

IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS 

Dir. Terry Gilliam. Prod. William Vince. Perf. Charles McKeown, Christopher Plummer, Heath Ledger, Jude Law, Verne Troyer, Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp, and Tom Waits. E1 Entertainment, 2009. Film.

Watching the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus feels like hearing somebody recount their dream. Both bore you for the same reason: because anything can happen at any moment, there exists no suspense. We feel no anxiety when thugs chase the hero, since at any moment the sky may spit asunder and disgorge platoons of patchwork pharaohs or motorcycle-riding crayfish to rescue him. The ground beneath the pursuers’ feet may turn to treacle. The wind may blow in an opaline mist of bumblebees in frockcoats that halts everybody in their tracks. Even as they herd him to the edge of a precipice, we know that a flying teacup may appear to whisk him out of their reach. Continue reading

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Comic Book Plots: The Problem Of Motionless Action

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logo_post_smallAllegedly, one of the great realisations of comic writers in the ’70s was that comics could have long story arcs, helping them escape an otherwise episodic formula, but the trick was to find a way to make the action appear to be important when no resolution or real forward momentum was actually possible. Villains and heroes would swap sides, love triangles would form and dissolve, stunning reveals would litter the pages and in the end, nothing would really ever happen. It was (and still is) a mass of spectacular action with no movement. Continue reading

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Self-Publishing In The Age Of Information Overload #1

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a_christmas_carol

This is the start of a new series in which I’ll be examining self-publishing in it’s various incarnations. Self-publishing has gone from being a dirty word among authors to being the hot new thing that everyone is talking about. Only, it isn’t exactly a hot new thing. The image is a page from Charles Dickens’s manuscript for A Christmas Carol – which he self-published back in the day.

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Prince of Databases

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gideons_bibleNEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE

Foundation Publications (1997, ISBN 978-1885217721)

A few years ago I attempted to rent advertising space in The Bible between the Old and New Testaments. I created a website for a fictional business called ‘Prince of Databases’ at:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/princeofdatabases/

I then emailed The Gideons International, who print and distribute Gideon’s Bible, at tgi@gideons.org: Continue reading

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Always Accessible

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the_taste_of_river_waterTHE TASTE OF RIVER WATER

Cate Kennedy

ISBN: 9781921844003

I must confess that the description ‘always accessible’ on the front inside jacket of Cate Kennedy’s new and selected poems The Taste of River Water got my hackles up.

It made me think of compromise, of poetic vision marked with footnotes, and mystery sacrificed through dogged meaning. It’s not that I thought poetry should be hard to understand, it’s just that it should be wild and free and grown from a fickle chip of the heart, and not inviting any old somebody in for a cup of tea and a bickie. Continue reading

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Becoming A Writer Reread #2

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becoming_a_writerBECOMING A WRITER

Dorothea Brande

This is the second instalment in my reread of Dorothea Brande’s remarkable 1934 book, Becoming a Writer. You can find part one here. In part one Dorothea Brande described the four key difficulties that prevent a person from writing. In the second chapter, she takes a closer look at what functional, professional writers are (generally speaking) like as a group. Continue reading

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Impressive

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the_godfatherTHE GODFATHER

Puzo, Mario (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969, ISBN 9780399103421)

Visiting Matt and Darryl meant sneaking through the lair of a cranky, nocturnal gremlin that had lodged itself in their living room. Tread too hard on a loose floorboard and it would jolt awake. In almost one breath it would shout obscenities, accuse you of freaking it out, demand to know your name and ask to borrow twenty dollars until Sunday.

The gremlin had a fringe of long hair around the edges of a bald scalp. In front, a silvered chain linked a piercing through its nose to a piercing in its right ear. Out in public it affected a knobbed staff and a billowing khaki duffle coat. In Darryl’s living room it wore a bathrobe (supplemented on occasion by something it’d “found spare” in Darryl’s clothes hamper). Continue reading

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Royal Park Reds

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das_kapitalDAS KAPITAL

Marx, Karl  (Penguin Classics; Reprint edition, 1992, ISBN 978-0140445688)

In all probability, Marxist sport associations have existed for as long as universities have funded student clubs. After nine meetings over boiled lentils, a few may even have contrived to play their first games. However one communist cricket club in Melbourne, called ‘The Royal Park Reds’, has fielded teams for more than thirty years.

Amateur cricket clubs in Australia play on two types of pitches: turf and matting. The former refers to the type of pitch professionals use: prepared strips of grass cared for by groundskeepers (often at copious expense); the latter to a concrete pitch dressed on the day with Astroturf mats brought by the teams. Continue reading

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Not The New Gallipoli

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birdsong

BIRDSONG

Sebastian Faulks (Vintage, 1994, ISBN 0099387913)

It might seem a strange choice for a 14-year-old girl, but Sebastian Faulks’ WWI period piece Birdsong was one of my favourite books through high school.  Possibly the first properly ‘adult’ literary novel I ever read, it provoked a deep emotional response and stoked a brief obsession with the distant horrors of the 20th century.  I am also quite certain it rekindled my childhood terror of birds, a fear I share with the novel’s chief character, Stephen Wraysford.  I recently reread the book and was pleased to discover that most of my initial impressions of it remain true: the book is not a light read, but it is a marvellously fluid one.  It is evocative and heartbreaking.  Most importantly, like any good historical novel*, it works to reveal new aspects of a well-studied time period and of the people who endured the First World War.  It does not glorify the war or its soldiers, both official and unofficial.  As we near the hundredth anniversary of the war’s commencement, Birdsong still holds an important message about the nature of the First World War in the historical imagination. Continue reading

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Boosterism [pt.2]

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babbittBABBITT

Sinclair Lewis (Bantam Classics, ISBN 978-0553214864)

Clayton’s households divide into two genera: proletarian families (and students) who accept Clayton’s wonderful seediness and property-amassing twenty-first-century Babbitts who resent it.

Amongst the latter, Bill Pontikis stands out for his efforts to assemble Clayton’s residents and businesses into a community. As one who has experienced Mr. Pontikis in person – sometimes at distances as little as five feet, I must conclude that rather than acting from any humanitarian motive, he simply wishes to enlarge the opportunities for commercial rapine. Nonetheless, the fact remains that unlike the majority of Clayton’s other petty napoleons, Pontikis has shown himself willing to take a hand in civic life. Continue reading

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Poor Pluto

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of_mice_and_menOF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck, John (Covici Friede, 1937, ISBN (reprint) 9780749717100)

The educational films they showed us in middle school seemed all at least twenty-years old. On flickering projector film, scientists in brown suits took us on a tour of the body’s respiratory system while sanitised hipsters with pompadours showed us how to resist peer pressure. Crew-cutted schoolboys discovered the power of lunchroom manners while other sons and daughters of white hegemony learned how quiet helps at school. Deep-voiced fabulists sold us a version of the American legislative process with no pharmaceutical or energy lobbyists. Other narrators, whose measured delivery somehow conveyed the vastness of space, described the then nine planets of the solar system as the viewpoint swept out towards poor Pluto (of late expelled from the League of Planets for conduct unbefitting a solar planet). Continue reading

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A Bleak Tale of Existential Horror

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oh_the_places_youll_goOH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO

Dr Seuss ISBN 978-0-00-790680-2

I first encountered Oh The Places You’ll Go only recently – this year in fact – and it struck me at once as very distinctly different from all the other Dr Seuss that I was familiar with. What was Dr Seuss attempting with this slim volume? It cannot have been to provide education or encouragement for children, except perhaps for the preternaturally precocious savant. This is a dark, twisting story about ambition, creative endeavour, failure and depression. It is a tale of an adult life full of adult worries and it is frequently deeply cutting. Continue reading

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