What I'm reading...

By Tracy

Not much else is happening, because poor Tim is still sick, and we're a bit housebound. We'd hoped to take him to the Model Railway Show over this long weekend, as we've been twice in past years, but even without the tonsillitis, Perth's weather would be a bit daunting: around 40mm of rain in a day -- we spent most of the day on edge checking the radar to be prepared if it hit up here in the wheatbelt, but nothing doing. (Not that I'm complaining -- I am no fan of storms.)

So we still have light to read by (apparently 20,000 homes across Perth lost power today, though most had it restored), and this is what I've been dipping into:

The new (very new, just launched on Thursday night) anthology from the Fellowship of Australian Writers' WA branch, Lines in the sand: new writing from Western Australia, edited by Glen Phillips and Julienne Van Loon. There are too many highlights to list here, but they start from the very first piece, Liz Byrski's unforgettable "The Man Who Wasn't There", about those who returned facially disfigured from WWII and the way in which they were treated -- in all senses, medically, socially and emotionally -- in the town of East Grinstead, Sussex, which was also the town of Liz Byrski's childhood, so there is a personal angle to this reportage.

I also appreciated Carol Millner's short, deft prose-piece, "Say World", understated and yet so telling, about a mother's migrant experience re-examined by her grown daughter. Apparently this story had previously won the Joyce Parkes Writers' Prize, sponsored by the Australian Irish Heritage Association, and "aimed at promoting and encouraging women as writers in Australia", with Joyce Parkes herself as patron.

And a real coup for the anthologists is the brief but warm memoir of the late Dorothy Hewett (here's an interview with Dorothy from Jacket magazine) by her sister Lesley Dougan.

Other reading: The Australian Book Review -- the February 2008 issue which I picked up in Canberra because I had somehow missed it, and because it contained a prize-winning essay by Rachel Robertson whose talk at the Canberra conference I had also missed. (Rachel Robertson also has a short story in the FAWWA anthology, and I'm glad to have come across her both in person and in print. I look forward to reading more of her work.)

And last but not least, an unexpected (came in the mail) and beautifully produced short work by Lee Ranaldo (musician, poet, artist, member and co-founder of Sonic Youth) and multimedia artist Leah Singer, Moroccan Journal: Jajouka excerpt. I picked it up to browse last night, and couldn't stop reading till I'd finished it. It's about time spent in 1995 with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, who it seems were the first "world music" group, and who'd been visited and apparently used to make a record by Brian Jones in the 1960s, as well as by Mick Jagger a couple of decades later (I didn't know about any of this because, unlike John, I'm not familiar with this strand of modern music history, so came to the book with no particular expectations. John has been saturating himself lately with Sonic Youth rarities, and intends to blog them further down the track.).

This little work is a detailed and sensitive account of an intercultural meeting-through-music (or meeting-in-music), complete with photographs, with a wonderful sense of sharing and open-hearted exchange on the part of the locals and the visitors.