Compare and Contrast

Have dropped the 'Electric Kool Aid Acid Test' for 'She' by H Rider Haggard.

For those who came late summary;

'The Honey Thief'
Whinging, moaning, chick stuff, a bicycle, Gilmour Girls-esq interaction, a bad imitation of 'Remembrance of Things Past'.

'She'
The chaps, having left the halls of Cambridge for the coast of Africa, have been ship wrecked in a storm. Gathering themselves and their possessions, they are spending the night in a long boat under the shadow of a menacing mountain (shaped like an Ethiopians head!). Lions have just been heard entering the water and are heading towards them...!!!!!!

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The Honey Thief has two more chapters to make the grade.

A help with my reading assignment

Have begun the 'Honey Thief', hopefully Book Kitteh is right...

Lets do this thing!

Okay, having previously posted about the literary qualities of contemporary female authors I set myself a challenge; to read and review a recent release.

This evening I visited my local library and selected what looked like a good read. I was fair, I could've picked a dud but I felt my theory needed an impartial test. The book I've selected is 'The Honey Thief' by Elizabeth Graver. The dust cover synopsis sounds god awful, a mother-daughter intrigue involving shoplifting or whatever. The main thing is female reviewers loved it, I am not the target audience and I'm moving out of my comfort zone.

I'll begin tomorrow. For the sake of literary calibration 'The Honey Thief' is up against Tom Wolfe's 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'. Let's roll!!

Please support your local library.

SkyHigh

Fire water!!
Which ought to indicate that I sat down with a plan to write something and am a bit stuck. I'll be heading into the station late today, because I can and hopefully because I'll be on to a new gig soon. So this is a winding down phase.

But it is also a being distracted phase. I find it hard to concentrate in moments like these. I'll make any excuse to distract myself from a task I've set. Its an odd reaction to trying to do something. So far I've put on two loads of washing (and hung them out) I've listened to the radio telling me of a brand new 'Afro Beat' compilation thats currently out (and sounds great!). I've put the kettle on twice, but haven't actually made a cup of tea. Threatened myself with morning television and played a game called Hex Empires [LINK, but I warn you it can be addictive] several times.

All while trying to write a description of the perfect weekend I just had. So what to tell you? It was my beloveds birthday on Saturday, so on Friday we went to Geelong for another birthday/housewarming. The house itself was incredible and we only saw it at night. Made the place we were staying in look like a run down beach shack.
Which is a pretty fair call, a friend of ours set us up with a friend of his for overnight accommodation in Torquay for $20 each. The house and land is rumoured to be worth a cool $1Mil. But very little has been invested in it since that late '80's when it was purchased. It looked like every beach house I ever stayed in right down to the beat up out of tune guitar in the corner! Despite the bare essential maintenance it was a great stay and I'd be tempted to go there again for the surfing and fishing around Torquay.

Saturday was the big day birth-wise and we spent it in fine fashion with a leisurely breakfast by the beach, a lunch time swim and a very casual meander back home. We unpacked felt slightly tired and went out for a birthday dinner at this amazing Thai place that was hidden at the back of some local shopping centre. On the Sunday we had family over and managed to do our first bit of real entertaining (since I arrived). There was more food than mouths and I personally drank and eat way too much. However we managed to return the house to good order and this morning is the start of another working week.

So having written how distracted I was and managed to get some focus in at last. Hooray for being able to distract my distraction ("I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.")

Waking up

(Haven't finished starting on my book challenge, accidentally began reading "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman. Bare with me.)

This morning I had a lot of trouble waking up. My eyes did not want to open, consciousness took a while to arrive. Every time I thought I was awake, I got out bed and wandered into the spare room (soon to be nursery) and checked the weather. As I do each day.
But I was dreaming myself awake. Which is an odd thing to do. To be aware within a dream that one is asleep and aware at the same time that they are awake within a dream. Whenever I would get up out of bed in my dream, something would stand out as obviously not part of the waking world. The room would be different in a subtle way or it could be the middle of the day or there was some feeling, nuance that told me this was a dream.

This occurred enough to remind me of those musings about dreams, the waking world and existence in either. I felt this morning was a good case for wondering if I'm not asleep still... (pretty boring dream so far, a lot less space aliens and random rock guitar solo's than I'd usually expect.)

Reasons to be Cheerful

I've been reading a stack of books these past few weeks (well at least its been a stack for me). In no particular order then;

• Love Me by Garrision Kellor
• I Claudius by Robert Graves
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer (vale as of last month)

Two have been recent releases (the John Mortimer novel was his last and finally draws out the details of oft mentioned Penge Bungalow Murders as well as how She Who Must Be Obeyed and Rumpole got married) while the others are literary classics that are quite polar in style and subject matter. The Robert Graves book I found for $5 at the Bangalow Market while I was up in Byron recently, while 'The Big Sleep' is the second Pip Marlowe I've read in the past few months.

So, an opinion; I suggest that the book industry is still alive and well and that a book can capture the publics imagination (bear in mind I am very anti-television, so somewhat biased) witness the effect of Harry Potter. What I also suggest is that when I peruse the shelves of my local library or bookstore, I am struck by the amount of appalling rubbish etched onto murdered trees. Most of which is written by women.
As a rule of thumb I can tell if a book is worthwhile from the gender of the author, the age of the author and the first paragraph. I have been mistaken before, special mention to 'The Winter Queen' by Boris Akun, but this intuition usually serves me well. The book industry however knows their market better than I do and have good evidence that the majority of book buyers are women. [LINK to an interview with Ian McEwan]
Ergo print what your readers want to read.

I however find the quality of modern writing to be low and of little literary value. Of course not every book published is written by a woman and I would be as guilty as Peter Reuhl of stereotyping to invite you to seriously entertain my proposition. But I remain unsatisfied by new titles, the majority of which are penned by women authors, and as such I retreat into the vast a satisfying back catalogues for succour. Where are the new books for me? Am I an Early Adopter of new genre's and therefore worthy of market attention?
The answer to the second question is no; I am very conservative in my choice of reading and have to be coaxed into trying something new. So perhaps the answer to my issue with new titles is obvious, why not give them a chance?
My new challange for this month therefore is to read and review a recent release for your benefit.
Watch this space, open to suggestions.

I wanna be at this Party!!

In support of an arguement

Have a read of this, [LINK] courtesy of Boing Boing.

Its some more good arguements for smashing your TV and railing against its absurd 'watch what we want you to watch, when we want you to watch it' paradigm.

(Ha! first actual use of the word paradigm in its correct context)

What annoys me more

Boy I tell you whut, I was reading an article in the Fin Revue this morning about the AATE (The Australian Association for the Teaching of English) (Him read word good) . Well there are two things that bugged the shit out of me about the article, firstly the obviously slow moving target of contemporary English Literature education and the second is the obvious reference to those Baby Boomer leeches (things were so much better in my day etc).

With regards to the first, the topic of the article cited the incompetence of young people today in respect to the rules of grammar. The second issue I have is that the writer held me in sympathy until he announced that he was a Baby Boomer and as such is worried about the ability of the youth of today to get a job and sustain his retirement benefits.

So here's what I don't get, the education revolution of the late 1960's and 1970's was the result of Baby Boomers who graduated from university with an aim to implementing neocon/anarcho-feminist readings of English literature. To then in turn blame those who received this education is akin to King Canute bitching about tide charts. The moment you envoke a 'generation' as a badge of recognition is the moment you exclude any serious discussion about the state of education in Australia. It demonstrates a pandering to sterotypes as well as betraying an all too comon character trait of people like this author, avoiding responsibility.

I'm sure this article was written tongue in cheek, it is contradictory to state that the very people you blame for creating a problem a: have no responsibility for fixing it and the b: you people are clueless, skilled deprived and threaten the hand out/welfare culture of the BB Generation.

So I do have to protest the quality of the writting, the point of the exercise and dissapointing limit of the authors grasp of events and causality.

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Here is a supporting LINK to my general rant against Baby Boomers.