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?

What is the appropriate collective noun for ginger beards?

I ask you. I'm not sure if it's because I was recently trawling for old-fashioned sponge cake recipes (the kind that Nanna used to make for the cake stall at school fairs), and came across a recipe for Ginger Fluff Sponge, but I can't stop thinking about ginger beards. The best sort of ginger beard is the ginger beard that lives on an otherwise brunette man. This sort of man can't help but look genuinely and permanently surprised at the colour of his facial hair. All this thought led me to wonder: what is the appropriate collective noun for ginger beards?

Here are my best attempts:
A blink of ginger beards.
A flurry of ginger beards.
A crackle of ginger beards.
A flame of ginger beards.

A boris of ginger beards.

I have provided a visual aid.

Suggestions are most welcome. 

Worldshaker - Richard Harland

There are many (great) things I could say about Worldshaker, which is a fantastically rolicking steampunk novel for young adults. Personally I am just feeling happy to tuck something of the steampunk genre under my belt. My lack of steampunk experience was starting to weight heavily on my conscience. There was steam! There were pistons! Cranes! Tailcoats!

But one of the things I enjoyed most about this book was the inventive names Harland came up with for all his characters. Really, they were things of beauty! Not only did they tumble pleasantly from my tongue, but they gave all sorts of clues as to personality and class. 

Here are some faves:

Ebnolia Porpentine

Sephaltina Turbot

Wisley Squellingham

And then right down at the bottom of the class hierarchy (clearly they could not afford many letters for their names):

Riff

Padder

Fossie

And the outright bestest Worldshaker name, for a much put-upon Menial, is: Wicky Popo. Wick-ee Po-Po. 

I think he might have taught me contract law at Monash University back in the early 00's.