I remember Ashley messaging me while she was drunk and celebrating EOFY with various work people to complain about poor treatment from a jealous old nag. At the time I was sitting in a hotel room in Kyoto while Anna slept, bored and watching, I think, Jurassic Park.
-5 July 2017
This post is part of the I Remember series.
I remember finding a Gudetama cafe in Osaka, and then, later, of course I watched a number of YouTube oddities when I got home concerning that very depressed little egg.
-4 July 2017
This post is part of the I Remember series.
I remember Anna’s pure joy at visiting the ramen museum in Osaka and being able to make her own cup noodles (which we still have, sealed, never to be eaten even though, at some point, pre-expiry, we could have).
-3 July 2017
This post is part of the I Remember series.
I remember endless yakitori skewers in Osaka, with my favourites being chicken thigh, neck, heart, liver, skin – all of the good bits which were never served back in Brisbane, Australia (2021 Update – Bird’s Nest in Fortitude Valley and West End serve these skewers. There may be other places). And the endless beers with their enormous heads, drunk by Anna and I from tiny izekayas scattered around the Dōtonbori area.
-2 July 2017
This post is part of the I Remember series.
I remember a Western-style cafe in Dotonbori which had an enormous map of the World up on the wall, huge really, with the prime coffee growing regions of the world identified and little text boxes jutting from each space, and instead of information about the geographic area or coffee type grown, instead there was lorem ipsum…
-1 July 2017
This post is part of the I Remember series.
I remember the strange area of Osaka called Amerikamura, where African Americans are paid to stand outside stores and encourage people to come in and experience ‘true America’.
-30 June 2017
This post is part of the I Remember series.
A day or so ago it became clear to me that I am woefully under-read when it comes to Greek literature, and particularly contemporary Greek literature. It’s an almost complete unknown to me, and I assume (or assumed) that Greek literature was reasonably minor on the world stage.
Appreciation goes to Damon Young (Twitter: @damonayoung) for helping me recognise this
I don’t really know where this idea came from. Unpacking it a little, it could perhaps relate to the idea that the Ancient Greeks were so influential and important that the language and its literature must be in a decline/decadent phase now. But I have no evidence to support this. Contemplating other languages around the world, and I don’t really share this feeling with any other – though perhaps slightly with Italian (for the same reason??). That said, I have read and own a lot more Italian literature, so this prejudice is vague and fading.
This is clearly an issue and something I need to resolve within myself and address. I was surprised to discover I felt this way because, before now, I haven’t really even though about Greek literature at all. Yet my initial reaction was negative. There’s a problem here, and it’s entirely with me.
I spent an hour or so looking through my books, and outside of a couple of novels by Nikos Kazantzakis, I don’t own anything by any Greek writers other than the pre-AD writers.
None!
So, I sent out a query to Twitter – who among contemporary Greek writers are worth looking into?
Happily, the response was significant, and now I have lots of names to slowly address. This is very fine, and the details of the recommendations are below.
I decided also to review a Greek short story writer or two, with the first being Sophia Nikolaidou. You can see the list below (I’ll update as I add more):
Something that jumped out to me was the lack of Greek writers among the journals and publications I own. I am not naming and shaming as such, but these include – Dalkey Archive, Absinthe, Two Lines, Overland, Granta, The Black Herald. Weighty names. Granted, I don’t own everything published under those umbrellas, so it’s entirely possible I am missing many fine Greek writeres, but they weren’t there when I went looking.
At any rate, the below represent recommendations from various Twitter folk. I haven’t read a single word by any of these writers (well, excluding today’s read and review of Houses Without Windows), but I certainly respect the individuals mentioned below. Follow them! And perhaps buy and read some of these authors and their books –
Welcome to my Let’s Read of Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.
Today I am reading Chapter 1, which takes us from pages 1 through 21.
I have begun this Let’s Read in order to expand my reading further into fantasy, particularly fantasy that is considered classic by the experts in the medium itself.
I am not well versed in fantasy as a genre. Well. I have read a number of books, but it’s all the same books that anyone else with a passing interest has read. A Song of Ice and Fire. The Wheel of Time. The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The Sword of Truth (forgive me). A bit of Joe Abercrombie, a touch of Scott Lynch, a dash of Gene Wolfe (just a dash). A book or two of Le Guin. In short – not enough, and what I have read is mostly male, mostly white, mostly epic fantasy.
What I haven’t read a lot of are the classics of the genre, or books written by women, or any group that isn’t a white male sharing their power fantasy.
I’m hoping these posts will encourage both myself to read wider, and also to engender dialogue about what fantasy is and could be and has been. Consider me ignorant but curious – help me if you know more and wish to share.
Patricia A. McKillip (McKillip) published this book when she was very young, 26, back in 1974. It won a number of awards, and forms part of Gollancz’s series, Fantasy Masterworks. I bought it on the strength of that series. She is, as of February 2021, alive, and continues to write and publish.
I am reading this book blind and sharing my impressions as I go. I am not intending on reviewing so much as sharing.
The book opens with a short introduction by Pat Cadigan. In it, he talks a little about the writer and a lot about the fact that he partied in the 1970s with a number of people. So it goes and moving on.
After that the book opens proper. McKillip begins with a prose style that clearly defines itself in the realm of fable. We learn of Sybel’s lineage, and the wizards and dark-eyed women who make up her parents and grandparents. Along the way the family’s connection to mythical beasts is explored, but honestly, these first few pages are a soup of nouns and sentences such as “The Wizard Heald coupled with a poor woman once”.
Sybel is born and, by then, the family’s connections to the outside world are mostly gone. Like us, for Sybel the names of nations and peoples are close to meaningless. Unlike us she lives with strange beasts and speaks with dragons. A man, Coren of Sirle, comes to see her, and with him is a baby, Tamlorn, a future king.
“Only…I do not know what to do with a baby. It cannot tell me what it needs.”
Coren was silent a moment. When he spoke finally, she heard the weariness haunting his voice like an overtone. “You are a girl. You should know such things.”
“Why?”
“Because – because you will have children someday and you – will have to know how to care for them.”
“I had no woman to care for me,” Sybel said. “My father fed me goat’s milk and taught me to read his books.”
Nonetheless she takes on the care of the baby, and starts to love him. An old woman offers to help raise the child – she leaves a gemstone for a nearby farmer in return for their cow. For the next several years as the child grows into a boy and then a man, villagers keep their barn doors open in hope that another gem might appear, another cow might be taken.
And Sybel learns to love.
Thus far, I am concerned at the sheer number of nonsense proper nouns that were thrown at me in the first few pages. Mondor. Eld. Eldwold. Terbrec. Sirle Lords. Fallow Field. Black Swan of Tirlith. King Merroc. Boar Cyrin. Gyld. These all from the first two pages. They signify little and mean less, but as I read I hold them in my mind in case they become relevant. It’s exhausting, and is an area, I think, where fantasy can be weak. How much of this is ‘world building’, and how much relevant? I hope to find out soon.
The book comes alive when Sybel and Coren discuss the baby’s plight and fate. There’s something to hold on to here, something tangible and real. I would not like it much if the book became an exercise in a strange woman learning how to learn through the magic of children, but I expect that this is not where it will go – such books aren’t considered classics, surely?
The confidence on display by McKillip is something. At twenty-six, she had the courage to open her book in such a manner, and then courage again to reduce the grandess from “Sirle Lords” to a crying baby in a handful of pages. It’s a striking first chapter, though the final page or so suffers again from Noun-ing too heavily, which perhaps bodes less well for future chapters.
Your mom’s a slut. I just have to throw that out there. This isn’t going to be easy for either of us but we’re ripping off the band-aid, son.
The anger of a wronged man is vast and knowable. Vast, because they perceive that the world is pulling them down, their jobs, their women, their children, their obligations – it’s all one giant conspiracy to keep them low, down, trodden upon. These men never look to economics or class. No, that problem is too big. And so it is the immediate surrounds which are to blame.
Knowable because they rage online, in person, to friends, to family. Their rage comes in the form of fists, of Facebook posts, of picketing in the streets. They cannot be silent. Whatever grievance they have must be heard, tediously stretching out across the decades that make up their miserable lives.
Women rage, too, but they have the modesty to remain quiet about it.
In Derek Maine’s Pontoon Boat is in the Front Yard, the rage comes via a message sent from father to son. The son is 16, and his life has been hard. But this story is not about him. No, instead it is about the father and his wife, ex-wife, the woman for whom his rage knows no bounds. He airs his grievances to his son in explicit, detailed form, ostensibly wrapping them around the errors of the step-father, but this is not the entire truth. The father’s rage reaches back to when she was young, at school, and extends forward to now and into the future. This is a rage that will never be loosened.
The step-father, we learn, abuses the teenager, and at the end of the communication the father provides an answer to his son. A gun, in the boat. One squeeze of the trigger and the problems are over. I note grimly that here the father offloads the responsibility of solving his son’s horrific problems to the child himself. He will not pull the trigger – he will simply rage.
To his small credit, the father offers up a list of his own flaws, including that of violence against the mother. But this list is used as a method of showing that he isn’t as bad as the others.
In truth they are all rotten. Perhaps the son is not, but everyone else is a dark planet orbiting a fallen star.
Maine’s language is loose, and crude, and a touch too-heavy on the swearing. Just a touch. This message, however it is being communicated, is one of speech, streaming directly from the narrator in an out-pouring of anger. This works, the character is believable, but the length of the short piece is just about as long as I’d like to spend inside his mind. It’s exhaustive, and imagine living like that?
There are some shining bright spots. Twice, the narrator mentions spending time with his son, and here the tone is pleasant, even kind. It’s a nice balance, and shows that no matter how these men might hate the world, what they love, they love.
This strikes me as a very American story. This is not a criticism or a commendation. The ending involves violence, or at least, encouraging violence, and in a manner that I, as an Australia, perceive as close to uniquely American. The answer provided is not to run away, or change, or engage the authorities – it is violence. Violence, violence, violence.
The rage continues, the generations feed on one another, and in twenty years time this teenage boy will be saying something much the same to his own son, likely from jail, unquestionably full of his own inherited anger.
Derek Maine’s Pontoon Boat is in the Front Yard is a short story published online at Misery Tourism. Derek’s Twitter account is @derekmainelives.
October 28 marks the day when I read 100 books for the year.
Let’s take a look at the breakdown of what I read –
Books written by men – 81
Books written by women – 19
Translated works – 70
Nobel Prize winning works – 21
Books by Small Presses – 46
Fantasy novels – 5
Average pages – 168 pages
So let’s analyse the above
Obviously the glaring, massive, disappointing issue is the percentage of women writers compared to men. It’s not good enough and I am honestly surprised. If I was asked I would have said perhaps 40%, but here we are under 20% for the year.
I need to do better. I have enough books written by women to dramatically improve these numbers.
The next book, which I am almost done at the time of writing this, was written by a woman, but that would only take the year from 19% to 19.8%. Lots and lots of work here to do.
Some of the notable women writers I have read this year include the incomparable Marguerite Duras. I prefer her late works, which are sparse, pristine, close to formless. Open Letter publish a number of these and I would strongly, strongly recommend checking out her work.
I like Rachel Cusk, but A Life’s Work is not a book I connected with particularly well. In it, Cusk grapples with being pregnant and then having a child. And I mean, she really grapples with it. To the point where she struggles with whether or not she hates her child while loving it. And, for me, with a very young child, I just found it too much. I don’t love/hate my child, and I haven’t struggled with parenting. Perhaps when she’s 10 and I am distanced from the baby-phase I might be able to read such a book dispassionately, but alas at this stage in my life I cannot.
Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth was very strong. Boiled down it’s an historical dialogue between a famous man and an unknown (to us, historically) woman. They discuss art, love, life and it’s all absolutely fascinating.
Otherwise, 70% being translated work seems about right. I certainly actively go out of my way to read translated work, and this is shown here. I would anticipate most years of my life would show 60-80% translated books, particularly now that my Updike/Bellow/Roth obsession of my twenties appears to be over.
Nobel Prize winners at 21 is fine. I have no real goal here other than I want to read as many as I can. One book in five seems fine, fine, fine. I’m drawn to novellas, as can be seen above, and it sometimes seems that most Nobel writers write big chunky bois.
Small Presses at 46% is good. I’d like to push that up to 50%, but I’m fine with where it is. Special shout-out as always to Open Letter, which make up 12 of the books I’ve read this year. They are doing excellent work. Other big hitters for me is Dalkey Archive Press and New Directions. The stalwarts, in other words.
Fantasy at 5 books is ok. I want it lower than 10% and here we are. Not much to say here. I tend to use fantasy as a way to kickstart my reading slumps and get me back into literature, but at times I’ll really dive deep into fantasy. Not this year, as we can see – though I have bought a simply enormous amount of books in the SF Masterworks and Fantasy Masterworks series. One day.
The average pages strikes me as slightly lower than I thought, but broadly speaking about right. I have a fondness for novellas. I have for years and I will continue to do so. The kind of literature I enjoy most explores an idea fully and then gets out of the way. That’s a novella.
So what does the rest of the year bring? Likely twenty more books. And they really, really need to be more heavily female. I’ve disappointed myself here, and with only two months left in the year I don’t really see how I rectify this in any meaningful way. Reading 20 books, all by women, before the year ends, still only puts me at one third written by females. Which I mean is better but c’mon.
At any rate, reading is not a numbers game, or not entirely so. I have not engaged in enough reading projects this year (ie – Spanish writers, Holocaust literature, Oulipo, etc), and this is something I’d like to do more of. Twitter is aflutter with reading projects and months devoted to a country or language or theme. And sure, that’s pretty great. But I chafe under the rope of another individual’s project, and so I will go it alone, reading, reading, reading.
But definitely reading more women.
Update – And here are the books
| Barthes, Roland | Camera Lucida | 28 October 2020 |
| Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa | Weep Not, Child | 27 October 2020 |
| Handke, Peter | Don Juan | 25 October 2020 |
| Zweig, Stefan | Journeys | 28 September 2020 |
| Darrieussecq, Marie | Our Life in the Forest | 26 September 2020 |
| Leiber, Fritz | Swords Against Wizardry | 26 September 2020 |
| Eaves, Will | Murmur | 24 September 2020 |
| Didion, Joan | South and West | 24 September 2020 |
| Pessoa, Fernando | Selected Poems | 5 September 2020 |
| Calvino, Italo | Invisible Cities | 3 September 2020 |
| Bataille, Georges | Story of the Eye | 2 September 2020 |
| Aira, Cesar | Dinner | 1 September 2020 |
| Greene, Graham | Doctor Fischer of Geneva | 31 August 2020 |
| Ionescu, Anamaria | Zodiac | 31 August 2020 |
| Beckett, Samuel | The Lost Ones | 26 August 2020 |
| Madej, Ryan | The Marianas Trench | 26 August 2020 |
| King, Stephen | The Gunslinger | 25 August 2020 |
| Eliot, T. S. | Murder in the Cathedral | 25 August 2020 |
| Bolano, Roberto | The Spirit of Science Fiction | 16 August 2020 |
| Perec, Georges | An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris | 16 August 2020 |
| Levi, Primo | Moments of Reprieve | 15 August 2020 |
| Origo, Iris | A Chill in the Air | 11 August 2020 |
| Beckett, Samuel | Dante and the Lobster | 9 August 2020 |
| Pilch, Jerzy | A Thousand Peaceful Cities | 8 August 2020 |
| Saer, Juan Jose | The One Before | 7 August 2020 |
| Togawa, Masako | The Master Key | 6 August 2020 |
| Sebald, W. G. | Campo Santo | 5 August 2020 |
| Gappah, Petina | An Elegy for Easterly | 3 August 2020 |
| Bolano, Roberto | By Night in Chile | 31 July 2020 |
| Vila-Matas, Enrique | Because She Never Asked | 30 July 2020 |
| Armitage, Samuel | Book of Matches | 29 July 2020 |
| Coleridge, Samuel Taylor | The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | 23 July 2020 |
| Review of Contemporary Fiction | Georges Perec Issue | 22 July 2020 |
| Hamsun, Knut | Victoria | 22 July 2020 |
| Cusk, Rachel | A Life’s Work | 21 July 2020 |
| Sirieix, Fred | Secret Service | 17 July 2020 |
| Roth, Philip | Zuckerman Unbound | 11 July 2020 |
| Whitehead, Colson | Apex Hides the Hurt | 10 July 2020 |
| Xingjian, Gao | The case for literature | 25 June 2020 |
| Roth, Philip | The Ghost Writer | 23 June 2020 |
| Beckett, Samuel | The Expelled and Other Novellas | 22 June 2020 |
| Mieville, China | Iron Council | 22 June 2020 |
| Fernandez Mallo, Agustin | Nocilla Experience | 16 June 2020 |
| Turner, David | Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel | 13 June 2020 |
| Nors, Dorthe | Mirror, Shoulder, Signal | 9 June 2020 |
| Modiano, Renzo | Of Jewish Race | 4 June 2020 |
| Ondjaki | The Whistler | 3 June 2020 |
| Sosnowski, Andrzej | Lodgings | 2 June 2020 |
| Navarro, Elvira | A Working Woman | 1 June 2020 |
| Modiano, Patrick | Honeymoon | 1 June 2020 |
| France, Anatole | Balthasar | 31 May 2020 |
| Baudelaire, Charles | The Flowers of Evil | 26 May 2020 |
| Wolf, Christa | No Place on Earth | 26 May 2020 |
| Brecht, Bertolt | Mother Courage and her Children | 22 May 2020 |
| Mella, Daniel | Older Brother | 21 May 2020 |
| Azam, Maryam | The Hijab Files | 19 May 2020 |
| Tenev, Georgi | Party Headquarters | 18 May 2020 |
| Alexievich, Svetlana | Zinky Boys | 17 May 2020 |
| Rey Rosa, Rodrigo | Severina | 16 May 2020 |
| Hesse, Hermann | Journey to the East | 14 May 2020 |
| Neruda, Pablo | Selected Poems | 13 May 2020 |
| Heaney, Seamus | New Selected Poems 1966-1987 | 12 May 2020 |
| Baudelaire, Charles | Paris Spleen | 9 May 2020 |
| Duras, Marguerite | L’Amour | 7 May 2020 |
| Erikson, Steven | Gardens of the Moon | 6 May 2020 |
| Holub, Miroslav | Vanishing Lung Syndrome | 6 May 2020 |
| Krasznahorkai, Laszlo | Satantango | 30 April 2020 |
| Maupassant, Gu de | Pierre and Jean | 29 April 2020 |
| Barba, Andres | Such Small Hands | 28 April 2020 |
| Camus, Albert | The Plague | 28 April 2020 |
| Watson, Holly | Never Seen the Sea | 26 April 2020 |
| Saat, Mari | The Saviour of Lasnamae | 25 April 2020 |
| Saramago, Jose | All the Names | 23 April 2020 |
| Sebald, W. G. | Vertigo | 18 April 2020 |
| Ogawa, Yoko | The Housekeeper and the Professor | 15 April 2020 |
| Modiano, Patrick | Sleep of Memory | 14 April 2020 |
| Rothes, Joshua | The Art of the Great Dictators | 19 March 2020 |
| Pizarnik, Alejandra | The Galloping Hour | 17 March 2020 |
| Camus, Albert | The Outsider | 16 March 2020 |
| Bidart, Frank | Half-Light – Collected Poems | 15 March 2020 |
| Rilke, Rainer Maria | Sonnets to Orpheus | 14 March 2020 |
| de Juan, Jose Luis | Napoleon’s Beekeeper | 12 March 2020 |
| Modiano, Patrick | The Search Warrant | 9 March 2020 |
| Mieville, China | The Scar | 8 March 2020 |
| Transtromer, Tomas | The Half-Finished Heaven | 2 March 2020 |
| Igov, Angel | A Short Tale of Shame | 20 February 2020 |
| Wolf, Ror | Two or Three Years Later | 11 February 2020 |
| Vollmann, William T | Whores for Gloria | 6 February 2020 |
| Kadare, Ismail | Broken April | 5 February 2020 |
| Mahfouz, Naguib | Miramar | 4 February 2020 |
| Duras, Marguerite | Abahn Sabana David | 3 February 2020 |
| Ljubic, Nicol | Stillness of the Sea | 3 February 2020 |
| Mariani, Lucio | Traces of Time | 1 February 2020 |
| Duras, Marguerite | Yann Andrea Steiner | 30 January 2020 |
| Blatnik, Andrej | You Do Understand | 24 January 2020 |
| Nordbrandt, Henrik | When we Leave Each Other | 23 January 2020 |
| Zambra, Alejandro | Multiple Choice | 16 January 2020 |
| Hazan, Eric | A History of the Barricade | 9 January 2020 |
| Hesse, Hermann | Poems | 6 January 2020 |
| Zambra, Alejandro | The Private Life of Trees | 2 January 2020 |
Railroad Perfection 