crazybrave

Ampersand Duck has posted about the first rush of excitement the Lifeline book fair brings – but I wouldn’t know about that, having not made it until late this afternoon, well and truly the business end.

She was met with a huge queue, which had eased somewhat:

Instead I had to battle the book gutses on their way out:

These were by no means the gutsiest of the gutses – I saw people filling minivans.

And inside was more like this than the literary cornucopia she described:

After I little while, Duck found me – and a little later we ran into Mindy – doing her second bookfair for the weekend (not in the least habit forming).

Still, treasures remained:

Nah, didn’t buy that one. Or these – BOOBS! as Sage would say:

This reminded me of the sad state of literature for young people in the 1980s:

The end of the last day is buy a bag for $2 and fill it for $15. This is my bag with Duck’s last minute special effort, bless her. I am SO good at jamming stuff in that bag.

If you want the full list – and Kamahl pictures – you’ll have to go over the fold.

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September’s The Monthly features an article by academic Judith Brett on writing her new book (with Anthony Moran) “Ordinary People’s Politics”. In it she says:

“Intellectuals’ autobiographies are full of stories about how ill at ease they felt with the people among whom they were born, the trials of solitude and how they never feel quite at home in the world. Sometimes, the tale is one where the intellectual or artist does eventually find people with whom to feel at home, socially or geographically far away from the place of their birth. Sometimes, the restlessness and alienation is endemic. Much twentieth-centrury intellectual history was driven by a critical and avant-gardist energy which pushed many intellectuals to explore the margins of social worlds and the dark side of human existence,and to expose the costs and repressions of particular socieites and moral systems.”

And what with it being September, and the month for reading The Vivisector with the Patrick White Reading Group, my mind immediately leapt to consider Mr Hurtle Duffield/Courtney and his aloneness. It’s come up in several discussions (check Laura’s round-up and in particular her post about Hurtle’s “self-enfoldness” – and isn’t that just a beautiful phrase?).

At first I thought of the obvious example of the Germaine Greer/Clive James/Barry Humphries expatriate crowd who had to leave Australia to live the lives they needed too. But I was also reminded of the the sense of self observation that people learning Buddhist meditation techniques are encouraged to develop.

I don’t think Hurtle’s manner is at it’s heart cruelty, as some have suggested. Rather, I see it as a lack of sentimentality and attachment. I think the perception of cruelty can arise when people around us are unsentimental and detached, because those modes of interacting are not socially or personally reassuring. We are supposed to be attached to our families.

It’s possible too, that his manner of dealing with his families is based in anxiety rather than rejection. He wants to write to father Courtney “and tell him he loved and understood him, better even than before his fall from omnipotence”. But doesn’t. Or can’t. And why, after Rhoda writes to tell him that his father is dead does he carry around for days a piece of paper, a pen that won’t work and a pencil (which he breaks) – unable to write a word, but able to overcome his muteness with a drawing. [SPOILER, I THINK, AS I HAVE LOST TRACK SOMEWHAT, BEG PARDON] Why does he later rip up his letters – every letter – immediately?[/SPOILER]

Hurtle doesn’t have enough energy to properly play the social games that ease our lives and to be an artist. And in one sense, it’s understandable – the child was sold, for money. And that kind of real social grace is in itself an accomplishment.

It’s easy to forget that while his manner is difficult for those around him, the art part is hard work for him. Artists first have to be able to look, and it’s hard to turn off that critical scrutiny. And poor Hurtle cannot function without an avenue of creative expression:

“Occasionally he made drawings, little more than notes, which couldn’t relieve his cynicism, nor his rage for physical exertion. He belched sour, and often wondered what had ever persuaded him he might become a painter. Later on he realised he had been expressing himself in his house: a wood-carving of necessity.”

It’s a necessity not only to have somewhere to live, but to be making.

And going a bit meta here, one thing I’ve found a bit tricky is whether we’re supposed to have read or be reading the nominated section at the time we’re discussing it (not that there’s some hard and fast rule). I’ve tried to get a bit ahead, and I think it makes things slightly awkward, although the additional context does make reading everyone’s comments more interesting. Next time, I think I’ll try and wing it a bit more.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a meme. Let’s face it, it’s been a while since I’ve done a bloody post. But the Duck has pinged me so here goes:

1. One book you have read more than once
I finished The Handmaid’s Tale a couple of days ago. I’ve been reading quite a lot about women in the central Asian countries lately – mainly Iran and Afghanistan – and I had a really strong urge to read it again. Far out that’s a good book (and one that others doing this meme have mentioned already).

2. One book you would want on a desert island
Impractically, Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. More usefully for boredom, read the Buddhists. I’d take A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield.

3. One book that made you laugh
Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre. I laughed like a drain, particularly at Mickey Sabbath’s imagined obituary “DID NOTHING FOR ISRAEL!”. Heh.

Funnily enough, de Sade’s Justine also made me laugh, and it made my naughty girlfriends laugh too. If I pick up the phone and there’s a voice saying “The extreme heat and constriction of your anus is driving me wild.” I know it’s one of two people. It’s stayed funny for about fifteen years. Well, to me at least. Last time I did it was … this afternoon.

4. One book that made you cry
If I am in a watery mood, the phone book can make me cry. That said, I find non fiction more upsetting than fiction. We Are Iran, a book about Iranian bloggers by Nasrin Alavi made me cry. I didn’t know that in the early days of the revolution the authorities might stop a woman on the street if she was wearing lipstick and slice her lips with razor blades. And a lot worse.

5. One book you wish you had written
I wish I had written The Vivisector, then I could impress all of my blog friends with my matchless insights at our book group.

6. One book you wish had never been written
I picked up (aka “caught”) a couple of bookcrossing.com books a couple of weeks ago. I was very excited. The badness of these books is beyond belief. I’m on a promise to Georg to blog about the psychoanalytical biography of Margaret Thatcher (“Chapter 4: On the pot”), so more about that later. Terrible as that book is, it will at least provide a post. The other one I found is Stanley Morgan’s Sky-jacked, and it would test anyone’s commitment to the idea that books should never be burned.

7. One book you are currently reading
I’m reading The Vivisector, for the Patrick White Reading Group. I started early out of fear of being Overtaken By Events, and because the things that bubble to the surface after a little while are often more interesting than first impressions. I’m enjoying it a great deal.

8. One book you have been meaning to read
John Dos Passos’ USA has been staring off the shelf at me for years now. Hello there! One day.

9. One Book That Changed Your Life
You know, I’m not really a dropped out of the sky, life changing revelation type person. I plod along, working out something here, getting some good advice there – always watching, watching. There’s no one book that has “changed my life”, but all the thousands of books I’ve read have helped shape me. I’ll be playing frickin’ kumbaya in a minute at this rate, won’t I?

I’m going to tag Mick, because he tagged me a little while ago for a meme I had already done.