THE BIGGEST SECRET
Icke, David (Bridge of Love Publications, 1999; ISBN 0-9526147-6-6)
David Icke believes in the literal truth of the postulate that the rest of us accept only as a metaphor: that the creatures who rule our planet belong to a race of blood-drinking lizardmen.
In 1991, Icke began to wear only the colour turquoise. Continue reading
An occasional viewer of ABC’s First Tuesday Bookclub, I tuned in the other month to see the “classic” up for review was Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Having nursed a fierce loathing for that novel since studying it for English in year 10, I watched, somewhat in the hope of having my opinion confirmed. Obviously I knew by then that teachers don’t intentionally assign books students will hate, but I was still surprised when a majority of the panel loved it. “To reject this book,” one panelist gushed (to paraphrase), “is to reject the nourishment of life.”
Well then.
To clarify, I wasn’t one of those students who refused to read assigned texts. I didn’t, either, automatically hate assigned texts. I actively enjoyed reading and analysing most of the set books*. On learning a friend in the literature class* had to write an essay on 1984, I became very excited and volunteered to write it for her*. Nonetheless, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is one of the three assigned books I hated with a passion. They were as follows:
The Miles Franklin Award was announced this week, going to Evie Wyld for All the Birds, Singing. The Miles Franklin is a very long-standing award and its announcement put me in mind of past controversies. I wondered if there was already a controversy around Evie Wyld’s win – a half-hearted Google rummage doesn’t seem to turn up rancour thus far at least. Nonetheless, it is the Miles Franklin after all, and sooner or later someone will complain about something. Continue reading
BOOK OF SAMUEL 1 
Chapter 17 (Holy Bible, ISBN for example 9780060649234)
A few days after Scott started housesitting at a penthouse apartment on Exhibition Street, a mob of us went around to visit him. An ancient tomcat lived in the laundry room. I remember it as Old Pukey. According to Scott, if anything startled it, it could vomit, and anything might startle it.
Old Pukey’s fur had started to fall out in patches. When it tried to purr, it made this awful gulping noise that sounded like it trying to clear its throat and not quite managing it. Continue reading
WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE
Dir. Les Blank. Perf. Werner Herzog, Alice Waters, Tom Luddy, Michael Goodwin, Chris Strachwitz and Phil Harberts. Flower Films, 1980. Film.
After cooking and eating his shoe in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog explains that he ranks a lack of adequate images as one of the gravest threats to civilisation. He puts it on par with overpopulation and ecological devastation.
For the man who fixes his focus well into the future, it cuts to the marrow of his fear that human progress in his society may’ve ground to a standstill. Without adequate images to knit its dreams from, can his society dream dreams of significance? Or will it spend its time perfecting the Slurpee and finding Australia’s Next Top Model, as its citizens grow more and more isolated from each another? Continue reading
PAIRS
This shows the paths of some specks of colour as they emerge from several moving bodies. Each body belongs to one of four breeds: those that emit teal specks of colour, those that emit orange ones, those that emit white ones or those that emit violet ones. Each breed, in turn, belongs to one of two pairs. Each body accelerates with a constant magnitude of acceleration towards the closest body among those belonging to the other breed in the pair to which its own breed belongs.
Meanwhile, each body emits specks of the appropriate colour in the direction opposite to its acceleration. All the specks of colour move at the same speed and fade as they move. Continue reading
GIFTS DIFFERING: UNDERSTANDING PERSONALITY TYPE
Myers, Isabel Briggs & Myers, Peter B. (Davies-Black Publishing, 1980; ISBN 089106074X)
The clock showed three when the speeding person made his move. He’d stalked me since two, prowling around the edge of the conversation, waiting to detach me from the herd. The need to verbalise his jumbled thoughts to some listener beat like a fever behind his eyes.
I knew a carnivore when I saw one, but the room’s shadows made him almost invisible. I think the Goths who decorated the place must’ve concocted them on purpose. Draped in costume-shop gloom for the occasion, their apartment looked like a Tim Burton exhibit realised in eight dollars of black and purple crepe paper. When I looked away for a twinkling moment, he pounced out of the shadows. Continue reading
FOUR
This shows the trails of some specks of colour as they emanate from four moving masses. Each mass attracts one of the other masses and all the specks of colour that emanate from it with a force that diminishes with the square of the distance: the mass that emits specks of green attracts the specks of violet and the mass that emits them, which in turn attracts the specks of blue and the mass that emits them, which in turn attracts the specks of ochre and the mass that emits them, which in turn attracts the specks of green and the mass that emits them. Each speck of colour fades as it moves. Continue reading
Allegedly, 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
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.
NEW 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
THE 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