reeling and writhing

do my dreaming and my scheming

This has to be one of the nicest posts in this series that I have read so far, along with Philip Hensher's, who may have sympathised with Kipling on the uses and abuses of a designated writing space.

"We've been in this house over 40 years and I'm 79 years old, so this room is full of my past. ". Alvarez issues a warning about helpful cleaners, and admits to playing poker online if his work is not going well.

Those of you who have been keeping up with the series will of course have seen this, and this (which you will no doubt remember next time you see a crowded desk.)

what's on my table, mabel

From the Bedside Books Club quarterly meet this evening, here's my list of table reads, which was available there in hard copy. Here, of course, it comes with links to reviews and other descriptive noises, where available.

And my totally personal categories for this rather idiosyncratic list are - recent good reads, anticipated good 'uns, and desired rereading.

It was important to me at the time of writing the talk a couple of weeks ago to include rereading. It remains important, not just as the component of a talk, but also as a practice. It won't happen overnight, but by gum, it's going to happen.

Recently delighted by:

Adamson, Robert. The Goldfinches of Baghdad (poetry)

Carey, Peter. Theft: A Love Story

Cheever, John. The World of Apples

Cunningham, Sophie. Bird

Elliott, Will. The Pilo Family Circus (most of the reviews for this contain spoilers, though I'm delighted to see it was published in the UK in 2007, after release in Australia in 2006. Just read it.)

Falconer, Delia. The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers

Ford, Richard. The Lay Of The Land (third of Ford's Bascombe trilogy - all three come recommended)

Gray, Robert. Afterimages (poetry)

­__________. The Land I Came Through Last (memoir)

HEAT magazine

Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line Of Beauty

Hyland, M.J. How The Light Gets In

__________. Carry Me Down

Island - 'a magazine of excellence and variety'.

Jach, Antoni. Napoleon’s Double

Johnson, A. Frances. Eugene’s Falls

Knox, Sara. The Orphan Gunner

Kureishi, Hanif. Something To Talk About

___________. The Buddha Of Suburbia

___________. Midnight All Day (stories)

Malouf, David. The Great World: "that  rarity, a novel of genuinely epic scope" - and I agree with Publishers' Weekly there.

Miller, Alex. Conditions of Faith

Mitchell, David, Number9 Dream

(Cloud Atlas is also magnificent).

Moore, Lisa. Alligator

O’Connor, Andrew. Tuvalu

Stow, Randolph. Visitants

Van Loon, Julienne, Road Story

Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria

Looking forward to:

Ballard, J.G. Complete Short Stories

Conrad, Joseph. Youth

Some more Pynchon

Jackson, Shirley.The Lottery

­_____________.We Have Always Lived In The Castle

Jach, Antoni. The Layers Of The City

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain (recommencing and FINISHING)

O’Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia

Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road (will it be coming to a theatre soon near you, though? I wonder.)

Want to reread:

Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. Spinster

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre

Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire

De Kretser, Michelle. The Lost Dog
(Conflicted about this one and need to understand if its mannered style was a problem, and if so, why.)

Maguire, Emily. The Gospel According To Luke
(rereading is in order, to reconsider the judgments I made about it in a review in 2006.)

The first half of The Magic Mountain

Toibin, Colm. The Master

(This links to Toibin's website, one of the most accessible and interesting author spaces  I've found anywhere online.)

Winton, Tim. The Riders

Wordsworth’s early edition of The Prelude of 1799, in only two books rather than twelve -raw, brief and arresting, and still available from Norton along with the 1805 and 1850 versions.

What I am also looking forward to  if I can handle the suspense:

Bei Dao – poetry and fiction. (Prominent Chinese poet who visited Australia in 2007).

Enright, Anne. What Are You Like
(reviewed by James Wood in 2000.)

R.F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A brief history of change, 1970-2000

Harmon, Joshua. Quinnehtukqut
A debut novel by a teacher of writing from  Vassar.

McCann, A.L. The White Body of Evening
Recommended somewhere by Ian Syson.

Murnane, Gerald. The Plains

Grace Paley and Ann Patchett – anything! I need to catch up with them.

Portis, Charles. True Grit
A 1968 classic ‘comic Western’ which was reissued with an afterword by Donna Tartt recently

Silvey, Craig. Rhubarb (shortlisted for the Vogel around 2003)

‘Silvey shows amazing maturity and confidence for such a young writer. This offbeat love story about a blind girl and reclusive cello maker has a strong affection for its eccentric cast of characters and a ripe Australian sense of humour.’ That’s what the Vogel judges said. James Ley saw it differently at the time.

Zagajewski, Adam. Another Beauty
Colm Toibin describes Zagajewski as 'the best prose essayist alive'.(Critical Mass blog)

Read ‘em all already? Then have a sticky here sometime, and
don’t forget to check out Donald Barthelme’s suggestions while you are there…

(Apologies to those reading in feedreaders, I have updated this today.)

i can haz cake on my bedside table?

It is a very great shame that the exuberant (and incredibly well-informed) Louise Swinn of Sleepers Publishing fame has prematurely retired from the blogging scene, and not just because she would have been excited about the nice new website that's been created for HEAT magazine.
The venerable editors have finally succumbed to inexorable pressure from well meaning fans and put smidgins of precious content online...only extracts, but that's a start.

According to Charles Taylor of the LA Times, reprints reign in some people's reading. I will be hoping to push the virtues of re-reading when I take part in the Bedside Books club's spring session at the State Library next Tuesday. Details here.

And here, shades of Black Books:

When we opened the London Review Bookshop in 2003, we hoped passionately that it would not just be a good bookshop but also a place where people could meet and exchange ideas. Expanding the shop through the history section to make room for the serious consumption of coffee and cake gives us an opportunity to achieve this.

We believe the London Review Cake Shop makes the London Review Bookshop an even more seductive prospect: a place to meet, talk, read and enjoy the best tea, coffee and cake in Bloomsbury - and to browse an incomparable selection of good books.

I have to admit the cakes do look pretty amazing.

in which the seasoned blogger is content to fail picture posting class

There was going to be a linkless post here about The Abbey, which started on the ABC last Sunday.

I did a draft which did not please me on a second reading a day later. So today marks a foray into posting pictures, not something I've done much on this blog.

Two things prompt this: my admiration of the efforts of others (who actually take pictures worth blogging) and my daughter's Danish Deluxe chair and rather extraordinary opshop cushion, my snap of which came up better than could be expected.

The occasion? The acquisition of a larger bookcase and plenty of shifting and dusting last week. And the discovery that the viewing window on the camera is not broken, it had simply been turned off. Doh.

Fun times. A few tingles in the forearms at the end of the day, though. And I am ashamed to show the double stacked books on the old bookshelf on the other side of the computer, though the CD stack just out of the picture there is stupendously well balanced.

Suffice it to say that once the big 'un was filled and a bit of weeding done, the double stacks were no more. Yep, a modest collection, but bigger than some in these parts. What we lack in quantity we make up for in quality, though - speaking of which, if anyone is after a copy of Sir Ian Botham's 1995 biography, it's looking for a home.

Funny how friends accidentally fall together when you're lumping them from one room to t'other prior to the final shelving dance  (the only other travel books I have are by Bruce Chatwin).

This chair was a begrudging addition to our family room, as it's not a big house, and the colour scheme is egregious enough without those seventies shades clogging up the palette (basically mid-90s pale green, cream and grey, with badly scarred mountain ash floors and a few toffee and rust bits and pieces.) There's a story behind the brown one, which my daughter carried up the hill to our house when her father refused to take it from the hard rubbish collection - she has a GESOH to realise it is funny that he now sits in it all the time.

Nice kid, great collector. She helped me buy the bookcase, and picked up a bakelite phone for a bit of a bargain price at the same time. She is aggrieved that her mates think she sounds tinny on it, however.

In other news from the 'hood, I walked down the hill to snap this slice of urban history this morning.

Being a very ordinary photographer, I've neglected to provide sufficient foregrounding - this block is about 80 - 100 ft deep, and until three or four days ago had a post-war home on it of some fibrous substance, which was of some concern to me as it's about the third home in the street recently to be barricaded off with metal fencing, and one of them had collapsed stumps and had sunk in the middle. (Dear little weatherboard it was, too. Perfect writer's house, with a magnificent garden. That block is still bare.) Needless to say, I wasn't worried for long. But I was delighted to see the date palm at the back of the block and stopped to speculate with the bulldozer's driver on its age (maybe 70 years old, we decided) and provenance. He was a useful source of information, telling me first that the palm will be moved to the front of the block, and also that there were brick foundations under the removed house, suggesting that an older home had been there and maybe had burned down, with a new home being built over the top post-war.

As the nearest orchardists lived behind my place, and the oldest house in the area is a couple of streets away from me (1870s cottage), the date palm was interesting. They sometimes grew near older homes because people were eating fresh dates and threw the pips out the window - that's the claim made up at Mont Delancey in Wandin, anyway, which sports several splendid specimens.

Enough alliteration. Keep your eyes out for pips, you never know where they'll end up.

* Okay, so the fookers won't move. I'll be playing on Typepad help this evening. Please pray for me.