Why I Like Adrian Tomine*

1) Mmm his drawings are just so black-and-white clean.

2) There's always one or two Asian/Eurasian characters in there. 

3) I can relate to his characters: they're always stumbling about unable to get over past loves or meet new ones. But -

4) His characters are severely fugged-up to an extent that I (hope) I will never be fugged-up. They have no self-knowledge, they never transcend their problems, and they are hopelessly, irretrievably emotionally disconnected. So while I can relate to them, I still get to feel slightly superior.

* Housemate Andrew and I are debating the pronunciation of his surname. Is it To-Meen? Or (and this possible given his Japanese-American background), To-Mee-Ne??

Lovely Words With Ugly Meanings # 1

Palaver n. 

1. A discussion or conference, especially a long or tedious one.

2. Any talk or activity regarded as unnecessary or too lengthy. 

My Shane Warne Drink Coaster

The last thing I want to do - in a year where he even has his own musical - is to give Shane Warne any more free publicity, however...
Last year as part of my publishing course, we had a guest lecturer talk about book marketing in all its varied and lovely forms. Most of our guest lecturers brought booty along for us: logoed pens, sample chapters, bookmarks, reading copies. However the marketing lecturer gave us something that has really gone the distance: a Shane Warne coaster advertising his biography Spun Out.
It's a cheap crappy cardboard coaster, but it sits proudly on my desk a year later. I like to place cups of tea upon Shane's squinting, blonde-tipped head. I don't know why I like this coaster so much. Possibly it's the quote on the back:

`He is a walking paradox.

He is supremely confident,

yet profoundly insecure.

He is brilliant

but also a buffoon.

He is generous and thoughtful,

but utterly self-obsessed...'

WHO IS HE?

If I Stay - Gayle Forman

It's a problem for me that my job involves writing reviews. Because I often say everything I want to say about a book in a work review and then have no steam left to even talk about the book with my friends. Then again, I can hardly be critical in work reviews, or bawdy, or use made-up words, so there's always hope.

So while I raved about If I Stay by Gayle Forman in a work review, saying I loved it (which I did), and that it's fantastic (which it is), what I didn't get to say was this: it had one of the hottest and most romantic sex scenes I've ever read. Don't think those Carlton mums would be buying it for their teenage daughters if I did say that!

I suppose it's a bit wrong saying that about a sex scene involving two seventeen-year-olds, but part of the reason it was so, ummm effective, was that the two characters were both complete beginners, and were really making it up as they went along. And shouldn't it be like that: as if every time is the first time? The two teenagers in question are both musicians (him rock, her classical - oh it's just like all the dance movies where the hip-hop guy falls for the ballet girl, such a good formula) and they're both so nervous to be alone in a bedroom together that they decide to pretend that each other is their chosen instrument to play. It's funny and awkward and sexy and very very sweet.

Of course there's so much more to this book, but when writers so often get sex scenes wrong, it's always good to notice when they get it right.

Ugly Words With Ugly Meanings #1

Cloaca, n.
1. A sewer.
2. The common cavity into which the intestinal, urinary and generative canals open in birds, reptiles, amphibians, many fishes and monotremes.

Tightarse 2009

Fun Ways to Save Money in 2009
1. Use coupons. I was so excited by the discovery of the mum's Entertainment Guide, and attendant vouchers to things like Sovereign Hill, Greater Onion and the Pancake Parlour, that I started a Facebook group called Coupon Madness. But then I was so embarassed I didn't invite anyone to join. As a person of semi-Asian extraction I can say this: Asians love coupons, so maybe I am not totally comfortable with my ethnicity. Or something.
2. Indulging my op-shopping mania. I'm thinking about resurrecting my ramekin collection.
3. Barter with people. We have figs, pomegranates, lemons, plums and pears in our back garden - surely someone wants to swap something with us? Also I make really great hot cross buns, and I am good at whipping people's writing into shape.
4. Utilise my whole free-ticket-at-the-Nova deal more often.
5. Utilise the very sweet borrowing CD's and DVD's arrangement at my work.
6. Go to the library.
7. Become lawless and learn how to sneak into gigs and festivals and other ticketed events.
8. Stay in and cook elaborate feast-like dinners.
9. Continue to grow my hair. This project never lasts past my ears. After that it will convert to: let my (non-hairdressery and usually drunk) friends cut my hair.

Ways I Will Not Be Saving Money In 2009
1. Buying Vitasoy instead of Bonsoy.
2. Drinking cheap whiskey.
3. Forgoing cafe brunches or takeaway when hungover and/or miserable and/or overworked.
4. Forgoing my occasional pummelling at the Sparkly Bear chinese massage place.
5. Not replacing my tatty underwear. Double negative - that's confusing.

Buckethead (non-G&R reference)

The poor buckethead dog is bowing and scraping her way around the backyard, dragging her humiliating plastic collar around with her. I think the Elizabethan dog bucket is the canine equivalent of orthodontic head gear for humans. I once watched a group of dogs at the park completely ostracise another dog who was wearing one. Plastic bucket collar. Not orthodontic head gear.

Handling the Undead - John Ajvide Lindqvist

At last! People are reading, or wanting to read, and talking about, one of my favourite books from last year - Let the Right One In. The movie version is currently showing at the Nova, probably causing the renewed interest. The film was great - except for one laughable scene involving a very-taxidermied-cat attack. But alas, I'm already onto Lindqvist's next book Handling The Undead. Let The Right One In was about vampires, Handling The Undead is about zombies, and apparently Lindqvist's latest book (published in Sweden, but yet to be translated into English) is about two teenage ghosts who ride motorbikes around town, quoting Smiths lyrics along the way! I do love this guy.

However...I had to stop reading HTU, only forty pages or so from the end. It was quite frankly doing my head in! I used to be the type that soldiered on to the end of any book or movie, out of a displaced sense of duty or perseverance, but fortunately I've grown out of this tendency (except for stupidly taking time out from the music at ATP to watch Kim Ki Duk's The Isle all the way through, including all the fish hooks in vagina bits and thereby ruining me for the rest of the day). It's not that the book is bad - it's great in fact - but it was just growing too depressing and painful for me to read. Some of that may have to do with my current mental state; there are times when it's wise to surround myself with only frothy, happy cultural products. This may well be one of those times.

I looked for reviews of HTU online, but I haven't been able to find anything considered or extensive. I was hoping someone could give me a reason to keep continuing, to show me the very dim light of hope that might be hiding somewhere in the book. But maybe it's not there. Lindqvist (in a rare interview) said of Let The Right One In that he was trying to imagine the reality of being a child vampire, that is would be `miserable, gross and lonely.' And I think that's exactly what he's doing in this second book.

It's not a zombie novel in the schlock horror sense (there's no braiiiinnnzzz going on), rather a very successful attempt to imagine how it would really be if everyone that had died in the Stockholm area in the previous two months, were to one day suddenly come back to life or re-animate. The book takes a two-pronged approach: on one level it follows a handful of characters whose loved ones return to them and examines their personal, individual reactions, and on the other level it examines how the state structures (the police, the military, the government) respond to a social emergency. It's fascinating and thought-provoking, with religion and philosophy and ethics and emotions all called into play....But...

I just find myself getting so panicked and depressed reading it! I'm not sure where Lindqvist or any of his characters stand on the nature of the soul, and its relation to the physical body. His very clearly drawn images of decaying bodies, with some minor aspects of the dead person's personality and memory still residing in there, leave me feeling really disturbed. It's not so much that I want people's souls to go somewhere after we die, it's more that I find the idea that they are not set free in a cease-to-exist-at-all way even more disturbing. Does that make any sense? This book has got me all confused!

On writing

I told my writerly and readerly housemate Andrew the other day that I had been writing in my journal a lot this week instead of working on my novel. He said, `Yeah, but it's still writing, isn't it?' And I guess it is. Anything that flexes the writing muscles on a daily basis has to be a good thing, right? Except, if I think of myself as a writer, I conceive of myself as more of an ancient, clunky, rusty metal machine that badly needs an oil change and service. Not a smooth Olympic athlete at all.

Sometimes I feel a writing impulse and don't quite know where to direct it. It used to be, do I work on a short story, or my novel? Do I compose a lovely eloquent email to an overseas friend? Now I seem to be adding outlets; I've started this blog (which may or may not go anywhere) and I've started writing in my journal again.

I have kept some of my journals over the years, and turfed others. My teenage diaries were so angst-ridden and heartfelt that I couldn't bear for them to even be sitting silently in a box in my bedroom. So I threw them out. Now of course I regret it deeply. Unfortunately my journal writing mostly seems to happen at crisis times, not happy times, giving a slightly skewed version of my past.

I am fascinated with one story about my childhood home. For the first ten years of my life I lived in a lovely old rambling house in Box Hill. The house was full of dark nooks and crannies; it had an attic leading down to a steep staircase that my sisters and I liked to surf down on cushions. It was a very mysterious house full of secrets and stories and hiding places.

Years after we moved out my dad told me this story. The man who lived in the house prior to us disappeared under strange circumstances. Apparently this man had accidentally hit a young boy with his car and killed him. Understandably he didn't seem to be able to get over this incident. He retreated to his house in the mountains (I seem to remember winter and snow as part of the details here), and was never heard of again, despite extensive searches. When my family moved into the house my dad found a small diary pushed high up in one of the chimneys. My dad kept the diary and pulled it out and showed me. It was small and had a black cover. The man had only written in the diary for two weeks, and once I read the diary I understood that this man had written the diary in maybe the worst two weeks of his life. I could also tell from the handwriting, and the man's grammar and spelling that he was not a writing man, that he rarely wrote anything down, let alone his feelings. Strangely, the diary entries weren't about the young boy and the accident. They were about his wife and his daughter.

I'm going to finish now. The dog is yelping quietly in her sleep.

Wakeup

I woke up to the beautiful sound of rain today. Or rather, not really the sound of rain actually falling, but all the muted, whooshy sounds of wet weather. Who would have thought a grey sky could be so welcome?