Holding-pattern post

By Tracy

I'm conscious of not having posted for ages. I've been very busy with PhD work for one thing.

Recently read or still reading: Gillian Mears, The Mint Lawn, Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water, Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (this one I haven't finished yet).

The Gillian Mears novel was very well-written but disturbing in its protagonist/narrator's apparent lack of compassion or generosity toward other people. The Highsmith was ok: not her absolute best, but it had its moments.

The McCarthy is elegantly written but pushing the limits of credibility. She does address this by having after-comments in each section, noting where other people's memories or her own doubts contest what she had written earlier. But the "agonies" of the childhood period seem very overplayed. (Still, I'll eventually finish it.)

I also squeezed in Simenon's The Little Man from Archangel, which was (to my mind) faultless. (John thought it was the best book of existential angst -- better than Sartre's Nausea or Camus's The Fall -- though acknowledging Simenon was not an existentialist in their sense.)

For my part, no Simenon novel has ever disappointed me yet.

Refusal, restoration and reading

This is a posting from both of us. It's been a really difficult few weeks with illness in the house, but we're all emerging from that now.

John had to cancel a couple of visits east to deliver papers, though he was lucky enough to have friends on the other side of the country willing to act as his proxy.

One of John's papers, delivered by David Brooks at the "Trace" poetry conference at Monash University, was entitled "Half-masts", and was another in his series of activist poetics essays.

These essays might be gathered together under the rubric of a "poetics of refusal". Both of us have decided that it's essential to cut back on our plane travel, and John was in fact supposed to make this journey by Indian-Pacific (train). He still has the tickets and will use them when he has to be in Adelaide next month. It's still using the world's resources, but reducing the amount we fly is a small step. John in particular flies too much and feels the overwhelming need to lessen and eventually stop this.

Interestingly, he's just having an email conversation with someone who took part in the conference, about the notion of complicity and distancing one's "self" or "subjectivity" in discussing these matters. Anyway, he might examine this at length in a later blog entry.

We are attempting to change our way of life by eventually going "off-grid" and powering our house with a complete solar (we hope) electricity system, and of course lessening our reliance on electricity anyway.

A composting toilet... And greywater recycling. Both are also on the cards, when we can. The time has come for us to make the step as a family... We are also looking to "restore" some damaged bush area, but more of that later.

When we were each single without children, it was easier for both of us to live without being so "plugged-in". The real challenge is to be able to do it as a family.

Weeks of flu were a bit of a challenge for our usually busy family too, but at least we could use some of the "inactive" time to catch up on reading.

John couldn't read at all for the first couple of weeks, but lately he's been reading

With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright

Patricia Avis's Virago title, Playing the Harlot (was never published in her lifetime, and its total flatness & lack of organisation show this, though it does have some moments)

The brilliant & inspiring Stendhal's Souvenirs d'Egotisme

He has also gone back to reading Edith Södergran's Complete Poems.

Tracy's just finished Graham Kershaw's The Home Crowd, his first novel (already read his second, Dovetail Road). In fact the main character of the second novel appears fleetingly and tangentially in the first, making me (Tracy) wonder if the author planned him already as a character at that early stage (kind of the way Balzac has people reappearing across his Comédie humaine) or if it was a later idea... I liked The Home Crowd very much: it's strong on mood and contemplation, and (like Dovetail Road, though with a completely different setting) very evocative of place and the people that spring from place.

Also partway through Amélie Nothomb's Robert des noms propres -- she irritates and fascinates in almost equal measure. As is evidenced by the fact that I put it down a while ago and haven't gone back to it, though I know I will.

And Camus's La Peste. Another universe entirely.