If a tree falls in the forest and no one Twitters about it, does it really happen?

I had a lovely day today. I went to Healesville with my work compadre Margaret, and we wandered about near the rainforest-y Badger Creek and Badger Weir before retiring to Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander for food-sweet-food. I did intend to take Housemate Andrew's digital camera, but was disorganised about the whole thing and forgot to ask him last night if he could leave it out. It's a pity I didn't get the opportunity to snap Margaret wearing a yellow rain poncho, posing touristically and awkwardly inside a hollow tree (that would have made me chuckle no end), but I wasn't too troubled about it. I have always maintained that tis better to have your head and eyes and nose and ears right in the moment, observing the leaf litter and the strange fungi and the lichen that grows beard-like on tree ferns, rather than be stuck behind a camera recording the hell out of the moment you just missed. 

So many people live like this these days, in a state of recording and documenting rather than experiencing (says me, with my blog and my facebook et cetera). After a particularly ill-fated and misguided excursion to the yoof full Fashion Keyboard about two years ago, I coined the term `digital tourettes' to refer to the youngsters seeming lack of control over their perpetually flashing digicams. 

But as I have just this week stepped out onto the edge of the slippery Twitter slope, it did amuse me to imagine tweeting from the middle of the forest.

`Just saw most amazing tree ever #amazingtreefernsoftheworld.'

`This mushroom has a hole in the top! So do the others. I wonder what that's about.' 

`Margaret's poncho is so yellow. So very yellow.' 

Lag? Clag? Drag?

I have been watching a lot of Gossip Girl lately, after having been urged to do so by a few of the DVD purveyors in my life. I am really enjoying it, although I would struggle to explain/justify why. But I am well aware that a good part of it is enjoyment at the many fancy and over-the-top outfits worn by the teens on the show. Big pussy bows, ultra-bright tights, high heels with short tartan skirts, chunky gold bling, ridiculous headbands and flouncy capes and coats. I'm only watching the first season so the fashion is a little out of date, but very pleasing nonetheless in its sheer ridiculousness.

It strikes me that this sort of hyper-luxe, exaggerated, highly-stylised dressing (which I think Gossip Girl has adopted very cannily and successfully from Sex and the City), is a type of drag. I've been trying to find a good definition of drag on the internets, but all the definitions I can find focus on adopting the clothes of another gender. But it's more than that, isn't it? It's also exaggerating and distorting the markers of gender for what? Entertainment, critique, subversion. I ain't a cultural studies academic so I'm hoping maybe Mel or someone will help me out here. This is only my layperson's feeling about drag. 

I think the characters on Gossip Girl are wearing a type of luxe drag (lag?). Or designer drag. Or class drag (Clag?). No one actually believes the costume designers on the show are choosing what Upper East girls really wear on a daily basis, no more than we believe Carrie Bradshaw could afford her outfits on a journo's salary. And I don't think the GG costume designers are simply making use of designer freebies to create aspirational looks for viewers. I feel like it's more than that. What it feels like to me is a distortion and inflation of luxury clothing into a cartoonish beast. A very, very enjoyable cartoonish beast. 

Att: Friends Who Like Fun...

...your Friday colouring in deadline is looming. Hup to it! I know those renegade martini colour innerers have been busy. Tash went quiet for a whole hour and has now submitted her entry. I noticed she has a very nice set of Derwents. And her pencils aren't bad either. Esther has been trash talking like Ali about how magnificent her entry is. You know what you have to do...

Cultural cringe (and other random corollaries)

I was pretty proud of myself the other day, for reading a book by an Australian author, a female Melbourne author, what's more.  There's always something quite pleasurable for me in reading books set in Melbourne. I love the instantaneous and deep recognition of cultural references that are possible in local books, and I love knowing the streets and places where the action is set.

But then right after finishing that book,  I made a beeline for (yet) another American book. It had a pink guitar on the cover! And it was set in L.A! L.A!

I am a sucker for American and British books. Unfairly or not, I do regard books written by overseas authors as more exciting, and more current than local ones.  I'm pretty sure I should feel bad about this; there's something a bit self-hating (not to mention untrue) about thinking all that's local is globally irrelevant, uninteresting or inward-looking. After hearing John Green speak recently, I became aware that Australian children's literature has an extremely good reputation overseas, so I can't plead any quality issues.  

But I think part of it can be explained away by my motivation for reading. Arguably, if I was reading solely for recognition and connection, then I would go for Australian writing. But I think I read largely for escape*, in which case I am naturally going to head for those books set in New York City, or mediaeval England, or a futuristic North America, or another planet entirely. 

But it's also not that simple. It in fact might be easier for me to relate to a foreign city-dwelling character than it is for me to relate to an Australian character that lives in the desert, or lived a hundred years ago. Western cities are so alike these days, and the lives of their inhabitants are so similar, that maybe it's only natural that I look to writing from other similar Western nations. Throw into that my preference for young adult fiction, and you have a real mess. Why would I choose to constantly read about characters who are at a completely different stage of life than me?

Anyway, I don't have an answer for this vexing tendency of mine. I'm not even sure I should be worried about it, although I do like the theory of supporting local industry. Perhaps the answer lies in balance: consuming a wide range of literature from Australia and overseas. In which case I think I should probably read more Australian books. 

On another related matter, I always used to feel terribly guilty that most of my favourite authors were male. This gender bias always puzzled me. It felt accidental. Or subconscious. I couldn't explain it. The feminist in me was v.vexed. (I do wonder if any men I know ever worry that they don't read enough female-authored books - do they? Men, do you?) Ever since I have started to read almost exclusively books for children or young adults, thankfully my gender pendulum has swung right back to the middle. I feel happiest in the middle. 

* I may yet blog about my worry that I don't read widely enough, that I don't challenge myself enough with a varied literary diet. That I read more for entertainment than intellectual stimulation. I've been worried about this, and I've been worried about what stories I am going to attempt to write in the future, ever since hearing Mal Peet talk about `chicken nuggets' at the Reading Matters Conference. I don't want to read fast food writing. I don't want to write in a fast food fashion. 

Devil's Kiss - Sarwat Chadda

It's been a while since I've done a book review, so I'd better pull my socks up and get on with it. It's not as if I haven't been reading - I have. In spades. Or is it buckets? I've read the new Meg Rosoff, the second Hunger Games book Catching Fire (oh, don't even get me started, better than the first if you can believe it), City of Glass (none of which I can't blog about due to extreme excitement, awe and inability to say anything sensible about such great books), Wicked Lovely and Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr, Wings by Aprilynne Pike (hereby referred to as my `faerie phase'), the second Mac Slater I Heart NY, all the books I read in preparation for the Reading Matters conference, and so on and so forth. It's easy to see I am failing to read more middle fiction this year, as so far it's been YA all the way. 

So what have I chosen to review? Devil's Kiss by Sarwat Chadda. And why? Due to the outlandish marketing assertion on the back that `Buffy and Lara pale into comparison next to BILLI SANGREAL, the FEISTY, WEAPON-WIELDING HEROINE of the series'. And yes, the whole marketing spiel was full of these ridiculous capitalisations. Now I don't know much about Lara. Say Lara Croft to me and I just think `BOOBIES' (caps that, marketers!)*. But I have recently started watching Buffy and Angel in order from the beginning with Housemate Andrew. I've come in as an adult Buffy virgin, which I am quite pleased about. And I started watching the series long after reading all the Twilight books, thereby saving me from entering the whole Buffy v. Bella debate. 

So, Devil's Kiss. Billi, a 15 year-old British schoolgirl, is the first female in the Knights Templar. The Knights Templar by this stage is a small ragtag bunch of older men who consider it their ongoing  duty to protect the world from evil forces; far from their days of glory, the Order has slid into anachronism. Billi is an extremely reluctant recruit; she's been allowed in the Order purely because her father is the Grandmaster and they need every pair of hands they have. Billi's life is grim and not one of her choosing. She spends her time training to fight demons rather than more normal teenage pursuits. Her father is a distant and cold character; focussed only on the needs of the Order. What sets this book apart for me is the interesting combination of Christian and Islamic iconography and mythology that arises due to Billi's mixed heritage, and the positioning of the very old school Knights against a modern London landscape. 

Billi is a great character. I wouldn't go so far as to say Buffy pales in comparison (the author is a big Buffy fan himself, so I'm sure he'd cringe himself at the comparison), but Billi definitely holds her own as FEISTY and WEAPON-WIELDING. Writing this post made me think about what it is we require from our modern fantasy heroines. We need them to be fighters in the physical sense, not with superhuman strength or strength that's unrealistic for a young woman, but we need them to be willing to enter the fray and use whatever skills they have at their disposal. 

But most of  all I think we require our heroines to battle emotional demons as much as physical ones. In this book Billi struggles constantly to cope with her father's lack of interest in her as anything other than a foot soldier of the Order. This is handled extremely well I think. The other hallmark for a fantasy heroine is a little bit of Wrong Love. The love that the reader/viewer feels deep down in their hearts and pants as much as if the love was their own, but which everyone knows is wrong, wrong, wrong. The love that is both destined and destined to never work out. Devil's Kiss has this in both Kay, Billi's longtime friend and Oracle, and Michael, the ultimate tattooed buff honeypot. Thinking of all the (dare I say it, I guess it's bandied about as a genre so I can) urban fantasy books I've read in the past year, faerie ones included, they have all contained their own versions of Wrong Love for their female heroines. 

* Please note that I think the back cover guff was written by UK marketers. Who, I am sure, have not the grammar nor spelling skillz of Australian ones. 

Funerals

I went to a funeral today. I hate funerals and I avoid them where necessary. This one was a bit fraught because it involved people that I have mixed feelings about. But I decided to go in the end because I wanted to support my oldest childhood friend, and because this 93 year-old woman had written me birthday and Christmas cards for years and years when I was young, and she had always given me thoughtful nanna-ish presents such as handkerchiefs and mini sewing kits. 

Anyway, the funeral was OK. It was quite religious, which was a little bit uncomfortable for an agnostic-rapidly-heading-towards-atheist such as I. I told my sister I was going to sing the hymns loudly and lustily, but when it came time to do so, they were too high and I didn't know the melodies. My aim at funerals is to hold it together and not cry, and I did manage to do that. I also remembered all the names I should of, and made polite conversations of appropriate lengths. 

But I did have an odd experience on the way home. An elderly gentleman who had attended the funeral took the tram with my sister and I, and conversed with us, and then me alone after my sister got off the tram. This elderly gentleman was most dapper. He had clearly been very successful in his former work life, was handsome in a silver-haired sort of way, very faintly roguish, and had very charming old-fashioned manners. I rather think he enjoyed talking to a young, female stranger. And I equally enjoyed talking to a man who was at a very different stage in his life. I was quite looking forward to reading my book on the tram, but soon found myself enjoying conversing with a stranger. He was from interstate, and had come to Melbourne for the funeral because his late mother had been pen friends with the lady whose funeral it was. 

When we came to saying goodbye, he revealed an extraordinary amount of personal information about his life to me in the matter of seconds. We exchanged email addresses and went our separate ways. I felt bad that I hadn't agreed to have a cup of tea with him, but I wanted to get home and do some yoga after what had been a difficult day. I'm not the sort of person who changes their plans on a whim; sometimes I wish I was that sort of person. I wondered why he felt he could tell me those things. I wasn't worried that he had, in fact I felt privileged that he would entrust those details to me. I guess funerals put people in a vulnerable state, the kind of state where they seek connections with other people. It was a day of family skeletons and private sadnesses. 

Jaypeg

By the power of greyskull, and thanks to the mad computer skillz of A.R. McDonald...here is a jpeg of aforementioned blank-canvas masterpiece DESWBR.

The Inaugural Long Blinks Colouring Competition

Sharpen your pencils people, check which of your textas haven't been left in the drawer without their lids on - it's colouring time!

Welcome to the inaugural Long Blinks colouring competition for adult people. For the origins of the competition, please see below. 

You've got two weeks to colour in a masterpiece. I don't want to be too prescriptive, but the kids in my work colouring competition were big on glitter and stickers and smudging and random heart-sprinkling and watercolour and full-page-colouring-in-WALL-OF-COLOUR extravaganzas. You've got some big shoes to fill. 

The prize will be tailored to the winning entry/ies. As I work in a bookstore it will involve a book. And as it's gonna be a cold, hard winter it will also involve alcohol.

OK, there is nothing more to do than to unveil the masterpiece you will colour: Dinosaur Eats A Souvlaki Watched By A Robot. Unfortunately the unveiling is metaphorical as it is extremely difficult to publish PDFs on Blogger. Instead email me to be sent this wonderful blank canvas for your work. 

Entries due by Friday 26th June 5pm. Email them to me at leannemhall@hotmail.com, or post them to me (you all know where I live, but if you don't, then email me and I'll assess your stalking capabilities). 

Very Hungry Caterpillar

Today Margaret and I commandeered the boardroom at work, and undertook the very serious and important task of judging the hotly contested (105 entries!) Very Hungry Caterpillar colouring competition. Believe me, I felt a massive responsibility in this role, as all the kids had put in such a lot of effort, and the prize was two suitably awesome mutant plush VHCs almost two metres in length. 

Margaret, our arts and design buyer, thankfully has extensive experience in judging school art competitions, and quite early on stated her possibly controversial theory that she preferred entries with a `creative approach' rather than ones that strictly coloured  within the lines. I entered many colouring competitions in my yoof, and I never won a single one, and now I know why. I was one of those kids that thought it was all about colouring perfectly within each section. Silly me. But really, it was quite uncanny to see the varieties of approaches the kids took. I think you can tell a lot about a kids personality by their predilection for colouring within, or with blatant disregard for, the lines. We had to engineer a complex six-stage judging process, with some built-in safeguards to combat our natural predilection for all things, random, scribbly and `creative.' 

Housemate Andrew kindly Twittered about our judging, complete with photos of favourite entries and our comments. Now, I am a bit of a Twitter virgin - I don't understand it, I don't pretend to understand it - but I was amazed to see how many people were viewing and commenting on our colouring competition. Maybe they were at work and maybe they were bored, but it was like people had been waiting all their life to talk about colouring in! I must admit organising this competition has been one of the most fun things I've done in my 2 1/2 years of bookshop work. Why does a colouring competition cause people to get so excited? Is it nostalgia? Does it connect us to our younger, scribblier and more individualistic creative selves? 

To this end I am going to hold my very own colouring competition. Tash and Andrew, as the only regular readers of this blog, you can just post your entries under my bedroom door. I expect you to enter. And because no one else reads my blog, I am going to email my friends that I consider to be Friends That Like Fun, and insist they enter. If you are one of these friends and you are subsequently reading this post, and you do not enter my colouring competition, please understand that I will now consider you to be a Friend That Does Not Like Fun. 

But first I have to draw the picture for you all to colour in.

Standby for further details. 

Maturity, Angst, Getting Older

We were listening to Joan as Police Woman's Real Life album at work today, and I was really listening to it as if for the first time, on account of shelving the new release non-fiction right near a big speaker, and on account of having nothing to do but alphabetise and listen. And it struck me that a lot of JAPW's songs were about being content and in love and happy and having found what she wanted/needed/was looking for. 

I'm so used to hearing young female singers singing about angst, heartbreak, lack of control, despair, masochism etc. that it was refreshing to hear this strength in her music. I think it is much easier to be creative about negative experiences and feelings rather than positive, but it's more imaginative and interesting to look past the end of your own nose. The word I thought of that in that moment that best described her music was `mature.' I'm avoiding reading her lyrics online before I write this post, because the important thing for me was how the songs made me feel, rather than the precise meaning. 

Once upon a time I would have regarded the adjective `mature' as a bit staid and insulting. But I've been thinking a bit about maturity recently, in fact ever since I turned 30 a year-and-a-half ago. Getting old is a strange thing. Conversations about babies or property that would have caused me to mime the gag reflex five years ago are now par for the course. I had a conversation with my yoga car pool buddies last night, where the (40-year-old) driver described how she has happily and willingly let go of all ambition and drive for success now that she's getting older. That she realises she could do or be anything, and ultimately it won't make a great difference to her contentment or happiness. And I thought: that sounds nice, but I'm not there yet. I will be there, but not before time. Listening to her comments I thought, no, I'm still burning. There are still so many things I want to achieve. 

I have had quite a few short stories published, but I have always missed out on being mentioned in reviews. Every time an anthology or journal I have a piece in is reviewed I eagerly scan it for mention of my work. And I am always disappointed. Well, the moment finally arrived (the Sleepers Almanac was reviewed in ABR, and my story was name-checked), and I couldn't quite figure out what the reviewer meant by her comments. She said something favourable about my story (that it was emotionally honest), and then made some more general comments about how she was a little sick of navel-gazey female protagonists that wafted about noticing cracks in the pavement. 

My first reaction was: fair enough. I know the sort of protagonist she means, and I know the kind of writing she means. I think my protagonist probably did fall into that category, and I'm fine with that. I wrote that story about a very specific time in my life, my tortured mid-twenties. And the reviewer, as an older woman, didn't really connect with it. I think my story reflected the concerns of me, at my age, in my particular circumstances. What I would be concerned with is if I am still writing those sort of characters in ten years time. I am really looking forward to turning my writer's eyes further outwards as I get older. I imagine it will be quite liberating to forget myself and work towards something a bit more universal, or at the very least, well outside my own experiences. Perhaps as I get older my writing will hinge less on pure emotions, and more on ideas?