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 I'm only watching the first season so the fashion is a little out of date, but very pleasing nonetheless in its sheer ridiculousness.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.