Perseus Q

The Trial

2011-03-10T14:25:00.000-08:00

by Franz Kafka

SPOILERS ABOUND!

I got to the penultimate chapter and the 'twist' that he was dead all along came to me like an angel, and after struggling through the pompousity of the book until that point, I was rapt that Kafka had tricked me thus. "Brilliant," I remarked, sucking on a Dunhill.

I put the book down, cleaned up the cat vomit, made a coffee and decided to do some post-read research on the internet. Turns out he wasn't dead. I misunderstood. I searched and searched, but nobody who knew a scrap about The Trial thought he was dead. I'm the only one, but jesus wept, Kafka died having not finished any of his novels; they exist only as weighty literary fragments with narrative ommissions and who is anyone to tell me I read it wrong? Not Kafka, not his mates, not the scholars and bookworms who reckon The Trial is all about the futility of trying to control elaborate situations, and/or some sort of abstract commentary on labyrinth-esque beauracratic structures and their accompanying architecture.

It's about death, you cunts. It's about judging one's own life, and getting into heaven, or not. It's the opposite of what everyone seems to agree it's about. It's about taking responsibility, not flailing one's arms and learning how to give up in the face of overwhelming complexity.

The advocate? An angel. The Law? God. The Frauleins and Fraus? The temptresses. The other clients? Souls, awaiting judgment of their own. Why am I the only one that saw the book like this? Am I dumb? How did I misinterpret the story so enormously?

All in all, I thought the book was, well, not bad. The main character, Joseph K, was an insufferable and pompous twat who I failed to sympathise with. I cared little for the outcome of his trial. I did enjoy the scenes when he was at work, at the Bank (always with a capital B), and his mind was wandering as his work piled up. That rang true. I've measured out my life in coffee spoons - and negelected admin. I stare at my computer screen at all the emails from clients and I often think, "Why are they emailing me? Can't they leave me alone? All these questions?", and like Joseph K, the only solace from the stresses of having to perform menial work tasks is the occassional thrill of a bosom in my palm.

But beyond that, Joseph K and I have little in common. I was happy to watch him suffer, but when the revelation that he was dead all along came I experienced a pang of guilt that I disliked him so. And in the final chapter when he was beheaded (in my interpretation, because he didn't quite understand he was dead, the guardian angels had to behead him so that he could come to grips with his purgatorive state) I decided that really, all along, on some level, I did like the dude. Hats off to Kafka at any rate. I'd avoided reading him for this long, but now I've ordered Metamporphosis from The Book Depository dot com for $2.41 (free shipping!).

I give it a B-.

**

PS: I've read heaps of books in the past year that I never bothered to review. I'm over blogging in many ways. But just want to note here that I give Bertrand Russell's 'History Of Western Philosophy' an A. Mind-numbingly awesome.

Vale, Saramago

2010-06-18T19:22:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite living writers has passed away; Nobel Prize winning Jose Saramago.

'Blindness' is in my Top 10 novels, ever.

He has the honour of being one of only three writers to have a quote magnetised to my fridge and it is this:

"...but when all is said and done, whoever goes, goes, and whoever remains, remains."

**

In other news, I've neglected this blog for a long time; more than a year in fact. I've read some good books in that time.

I'm going to start it up again...

The Leopard

2009-06-07T19:49:00.001-07:00

By Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

I failed. You can keep your presents, because my War & Peace challenge collapsed under the weight of sport, alcohol, hot legs and most tellingly, a hangover. See, when I read Les Miserables in 48 hours, I was living in an underground and picayune apartment in the middle of Athens, Greece, doing my best to become a 'poet' by chain-smoking Marlboros and refusing to lower myself by holding down a decent occupation, and spending what little money I had on nothing but cigarettes, floozies and books. There was no footy, and in the darkened flat, common society could easily be shut out. Reading Les Miserables in 48 hours was no more difficult than making the bed with hospital corners.

Not so in a country town where everyone knows my door is open and the fridge is filled with beer, and where I have FOXTEL which means every footy match is accessable. I had every intention of completing the War & Peace challenge, but Friday night I just had to watch Wallace's last game as coach of Richmond.

"No matter," I thought, "I'll start War & Peace Saturday morning, and finish it Monday morning..."

Noble aims are extinguished by ignoble lusts.

I was hammering through the book with a young man's zeal, managing to keep abreast of the long Russian names (all seemingly starting with 'A' or 'B') and their nickname variations, underlining great passages, throwing myself into early 19th century politics and all the while smoking Stuyvesants and drinking so much coffee that there was more caffeine in my blood than blood.

Then The Mermaid popped in.

The Mermaid is a local girl, 19, hot, sweet and a good friend. She lives in Melbourne now and goes to Uni, but when she used to live here she would house-sit for me when I went away. We get along well because she's very bookish and is highly attracted to my book collection, and she smokes and drinks red wine, and even modelled in a mermaid outfit for one of my band's photo shoots (hence the nickname). Besides all that, we are the only two goths in the village.

She had come down for the weekend and suggested having dinner. At this point, I should have said, "No, I'm reading War and Peace in 48 hours to impress a group of people I know over the internet but have never met in real life and they are going to send me presents if I do so." But how can you say that to a mermaid goth? You can't. I actually said, "No worries. Glass o' wine?"

This then lead to hours and hours of food, alcohol and poetry reading (yes, poetry reading - she's very, very bookish) and an impromptu photo shoot around my kitchen at 1am. Arty camera wobble? No. Drunken.

With stockings like that, what was I supposed to do? Read a book? No, I made the mistake of keeping up with her drinking, and she's good at it. I walked her home at 2.30am and she kissed me on the cheek, thanking me I suspect for being the only man on Earth that she can spend time with that doesn't try to fuck her, and then I walked home and went to bed.

The hangover next day was crippling. CRIPPLING! War & Peace was put aside and the footy was turned on. Thank you to Melba for the casserole.

So anyway, I only got 350 pages into it, and I'll attempt to finish it this week, work depending, which is still pretty good. In the meantime, let me discuss this book, The Leopard.

This is one of Salman Rushdie's favourites, and he reckons it's also the best book to movie translation. A mate of mine, El Tel, also had this book in his top 3 ever. And, well, it was pretty fucking good but I'm not putting it into my Top 20. The writer di Lampedusa wrote this (his only book) just before he died and he never got to reap the benefits of the fame it brought him. It is considered in Italy especially one of the greatest, if not the greatest Italian novel of all time.

It also happens to be factual, in that it is based on the author's grandfather, the last of a long line of Sicilian Princes whose royal stature fell by the wayside under the unification of Italy in the mid 1800's. It is always fascinating... every page is mind-numbingly interesting, and he certainly captures the transition between the feudal/royal power and that of the upper middle-class aspirational bureaucrat.

Of the group taking power from the allegedly 'corrupt' lords, he writes that they were "...very like those living in the monasteries below, as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power." Cue comparisons with every other revolutionary movement, ever, from Brutus to Peru's Shining Path.

But the Prince (whose family logo is a leopard) is a realist and is one who is looked after by the unifiers as he doesn't try to fight them and in fact, uses his popularity to help them bring Sicily into the Italian fold. He understands that hundreds of years of royal lineage means nothing against the flow of democracy and unification, and they allow him to keep his prestige and wealth in return for lack of power. However, by being so friendly to the revolutionary forces, his prestige is diminished in any case. He marries his nephew off to a wealthy landowner's heiress (new money), and in one poignant scene, invites a commoner to dine at the palace which "...began the decline of his prestige."

It's the death of empire, told on a microcosmic level, and the tour we take through the Leopard's palaces with centuries' old orgy rooms, now locked, classic libraries overrun with dust, dilapidated monasteries and the last vestiges of an ageing man's lust all serve as metaphors. But what's great is that di Lampedusa, who died penniless, doesn't write with any bitterness. He doesn't lament his family's fall from royal prestige, he is just saying, "This is what happened to my family," and also, "This is what happened to Sicily."

But in one outburst by the Prince to a Roman representatitve who has come to beseech the Prince to join the Senate, he points out that no matter who is in charge, Sicily, and indeed any person anywhere in the world cannot ever be fully integrated into a far-off political machine. He says of Sicily:

"...water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat; and when the rains come, they are always tempestuous and set dry torrents to frenzy, drown beasts and men on the very spot where two weeks before both had been dying of thirst. The violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from all directions, who were at once obeyed, soon detested and always misunderstood; their sole means of expression works of art we found enigmatic and taxes we found only too intelligible, and which they spent elsewhere. All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of the mind."

The only thing I didn't like about the book was the amount of weight given to the falling in love of the Prince's nephew and the landowner's daughter. It took up half the story, whereas it should have been a little sub-plot taking up no more than a couple of pages.

Still, I recommend the book, and give it a B+.

News Of A Kidnapping

2009-05-28T02:55:00.001-07:00

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(I'm still playing catchup. Coming soon, some Schopenhauer, 'The Leopard', more Bible, a science book and much much more. Stick around...)

I'm a Marquez fan. One Hundred Years Of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera are both marvellous, marvellous books and I highly recommend both.

Marquez was also once a journalist and occasionally forays back into journo-land. A few years ago I read a book called The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor by Marquez where he interviewed, you know, a shipwrecked sailor, and that was pretty cool so I thought I'd give this a try.

It was okay. It was interesting, though all those Colombian names became a blur after a while. It was set in the time that Pablo Escobar the drug baron was being hunted by the US, and he knew that if he was caught they'd execute him. So, he was offering to hand himself over to the Colombian authorities in return for immunity against extradition to the US. He and his drug baron mates called themselves 'The Extraditables' and were hoping to reverse this position, but of course, the Colombians were under presuure from the US to hand him over.

Whilst the Colombian authorities were trying to deal with it constitutionally, Escobar was dealing with it by kidnapping and occasionally killing prominent people. Journalists, relatives of politicians and so on.

This book is a re-telling of the stories of those who were kidnapped and were lucky enough to get out (some after two years of captivity).

Marquez does a very good job bringing the scenario alive (he had access to all the captives, as well as former Presidents and Ministers to help write this book). We learn all about the drug trade, Colombian constitutional nuances, and most importantly, he expertly and vividly portrays the trials of being under captivity. You can smell it in the holding cells. The tedium, the good guards and bad guards, the food, the endless TV watching because there was little else to do.

The most interesting bit concerned an old celebrity Catholic priest, Father Garcia Herrero, who is clearly mentally-ill and talked gibberish, but for many years he was on Colombian TV every night delivering a one minute sermon and he was a national treasure. He made it his goal to secure the release of the prisoners, and Escobar, being a Catholic drug baron, did indeed give the Priest an audience. Even drug barons are lured by celebrity.

Also interesting is that on Colombian TV, relatives of people kidnapped aired messages to the captives, and the captives were allowed to watch!

So all in all, it was an interesting read, and if you're Colombian or a constitutional lawyer, an important read, but really, all it is is a very well written piece of journalism and my advice is: Wait for the film.

C

It's Like Bloody 'War & Peace'! In Fact, It Is!

2009-04-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

I have a few books to still review, and I'm halfway through reading a book at the moment that's going slow because I'm not that into it, and anyway, I'm lethargic, generally, in my life, right now. I turn 40 soon. I'm getting stressed. I need a girlfriend.

Anyway, after reading The Costello Memoirs on a dare, I was reminded of a time many years ago, I was about 24 I think, living in Athens, Greece, when a mate dared me to read Les Miserables in 48 hours. I accepted the dare, and did it, having only a few hours sleep and a hell of a lot of coffee.

And today I thought to myself, "What happened to that plucky young literary kid?" and the answer was, "He approached 40, discovered hair was starting to grow out of his shoulders, and panicked." But as Dylan Thomas said, I must rage, rage against the dying of the light. Being lead singer of a punk band that does the sex, drugs and rock and roll shit when we play helps, but we're not gigging much right now, so I'm going to get my kicks in my own old way...

I plan to read War & Peace in 48 hours*. Not sure when yet, maybe next weekend, but soon, in any case.

I have it in hardback. It's a tad under 1400 pages and the font is small. You could put my hardback version in a gymnasium and do reps above your head. Like a black man's appendage in 70's porn, I am intimidated by its size.

Anyone want to offer incentives? Back when I did 'Les Miserable', my mate said if I could do it, he'd take me out for a coffee. Yes, I did it for one coffee (I chose a frappe because it was summer in Greece, and for some reason, the Frappes over there are fucking incredible and 1,000,000 times better than anyone else's... so are their tomatoes and mangoes), and it was the lure of the frappe that kept me going at 4am when struggling through one of Victor Hugo's many tangents (like, his 90 page tangent on the history of the Parisian sewerage system, which in fact was more interesting than you'd think).

Any incentive will make this easier for me. Thank you in advance for your sponsorship.

PS: What do you think of my new picture up top?

*I would start on a Friday night after work, and finish Sunday evening or in the wee hours of Monday.

Kingdom Of Fear

2009-04-28T02:03:00.000-07:00

By Hunter S. Thompson

He goes on a bit.

Nag, nag, nag.

The dude can write, I'll give him that. He can weave a sentence beautifully, but the paranoia thing gets to me. It's all about 'them' and 'they' and 'the cops' and 'the government' as if they are a coherent and singular entity out to trod on him personally.

This book is a series of anecodtes, vignettes and reminisces, but in the end, all I got from it was that he smoked too much pot and was paranoid. There was some touching moments, some laugh out loud moments, but mostly groan moments as I was forced to enter deep into his paranoid psyche.

I did however find, buried deep on page 289, something that made me think he was aware that perhaps he was largely acting the goat... he wrote about his relationships with 'the cops': "They were probably nice people and so was I - but we were not meant for each other... There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this Earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other..."

That was one of the only moments in the book where he conceded that 'they' might be people as well.

Still, his rebellious nature does make for some fine reading at times, but better to read an article here and there rather than a whole book.

I give it C minus.

(That's two reviews in two days - I have some catching up to do)

The Costello Memoirs

2009-04-27T01:29:00.000-07:00

By Peter Costello
Former Treasurer of Australia

Peter Costello to boy:
"I also succeeded in putting in place capital acquisition programs which actually allocated money to specific programs. We discovered, for example, that in listing projects for capital acquisition Defence never allowed for deprectiation or repairs!"

Boy to Peter Costello:
"I got a lollypop."

**

Here's an anecdote about a time when he was spending a lot of late nights with Finance Minister John Fahey, working on some revenue committee thing and putting in a lot of hours.

Are you ready for this? Alright, here it goes...

"At the end of the process, after months away from home, John said to me one night, 'I haven't seen much of Colleen (his wife) lately. And I guess you haven't seen much of Tanya. In fact, we now spend more time with each other that we spend with our wives...' I cut him off. "I'm getting a little uncomfortable about where this conversation is heading, John!'"

Did you catch it? Did you see it? Because there it was, the only gag in 385 pages of memoirs.

That was it! A kinda gay joke! That was fairdinkum the most funny thing in the whole book, and it wasn't even funny, at all.

Then again, I did laugh a few times in the book, but only at parts I wasn't supposed to be laughing at.

**

Look, it's easy to bag this book, and Costello himself, and don't worry, I intend to, but, let me start with a few positives, some of them controversial amongst my left leaning friends.

First of all, if anyone was to be the Treasurer during the Howard years, I'm glad it was Costello. For starters, he LOVES taxation law. The most vibrant passages of the book, where his personality seems to come to life and what meagre charm he posseses jumps up from the page, are all to be found when discussing economic mechanics. There were chapters and chapters where he goes to great lengths explaining how the IMF works, what GDP is, and how Treasuries, banks and taxation laws all come together. Like over 100 pages was just explaining how stuff works (obviously to then give merit to the decisions he made - the extract above with the picture is a typical sentence). But really, the only people who would be vaguely interesetd in any of it would be budding Federal Treasurers. For the rest of us, it was stuff that belonged in an appendix. Even so, his enthusiasm was admirable.

But another reason he made a good treasurer was because I don't think he made one economic decision based on politics. Every economic decision he made seems to have been made on an economic level - in that it had economic, not political justification. Whether he made wrong or right economic decisions is neither here nor there, the point is, he left politics out of it somehow and on that level, he was a worthy treasurer. In fact, he even used economics for good instead of evil at one point, when squeezing Indonesia over the East Timor issue. It's a long story, but basically, he helped Indonesia fix some economic problems in return for getting the fuck out of East Timor.. which is more than Keating ever did (I loved Keating, but on East Timor, he failed me).

Costello would also make a fine husband and father. Reliable, devoted, and mentally sound. That comes through in the book too. He seems a nice enough guy, and if he had to pick you up from footy training, he would be there on time. Good on him. Also, he's a Blackburn boy, and I'm originally a Mitcham boy, so, you know, he gets a point for being a boy from down the road, even though he went to a toffee private school and I went to Mitcham 'Igh.

A final positive... his view of Howard is hilarious, unintentionally. He presents Howard (who, by the way, he constantly refers to as 'Howard') as this vague, shadowy figure who sometimes crawls out of his ivory cave to ask how things are going, then crawls back into the cave, leaving the real people alone to do the work. After reading this book you get the impression that Howard never actually made a decision about anything, or ever actually did a day's work. He was just a mouthpiece for Costello and all the other hard-working Ministers who made the decisions and did all the work. But you know what, Costello? I think that's a better system. I don't want my Prime-Minister bogged down until 3am wading through economic data. I want him or her to be fresh in the morning, fresh to lead. And that's one thing Howard could do (rightly or wrongly) and you can't do. Face it Costello - you were the worker, he was the leader, and that system kept the two of youse in power for more than a decade.

The biggest problem with the book (aside from it being boring as batshit) is that it proves that Keating was right when he said Costello was 'all tip, no iceberg'. Try as I did, in 385 pages, I still don't know what this man believes in, aside from God. Which, by the way, grant me this aside. He believes in God too much for my liking and should be prevented from holding office. His wife had a brain problem and nearly died. Costello writes "...medical assistance and, in my view, divine intervention saw her recover..." Divine intervention? You're kidding me? God, as a sole and sentient entity personally healed your wife with the assistance of doctors? Fuck off idiot.

No, aside from God, there's nothing I could find in here. There's a few things he doesn't believe in, like, left wingers, and Brian Harradine (who, by the way, fucked the Libs on the GST by asking for the removal of some gay safe-sex material from a Government publication - Costello thought that meant Harradine would support GST, but he didn't), but there's nothing that I could put my finger on when it came to what he actually wanted in a society, aside from canny taxation law and 'law and order'. Even his dislike of the left is lame, as it was developed in his Monash Uni days when he encountered some extreme-left anti-semites, but jesus, I don't dismiss all conservative-leading policy just because Hitler existed, so I can't see why he refused to acknowledge anything from the left just because of some militant arsewipes he came across at Uni and in the Union movement.

When it got to the Pauline Hanson bit, I thought maybe he'd be able to let loose, but even then it was a pragmatic but gutless response. He backed the decision to "...not attack Hanson personally... (but to)attack her policies in a logical and analytical way." I recall that backfiring even then, but he still supports it. She was using emotional language and she needed to be fought on that level, as well as a 'logical' level. But it came to me then, reading that - that's his whole political life, this Costello man. Take God away, and all he has is 'logical and analytical', and that's the 'no iceberg' quip in a nutshell. That's why he can't lead the country. Not enough heart. Brains and dignity aplenty, but no heart.

I also found him disrespectful to the ALP leaders. He seemd to like Beazley as a man (not as a pollie), and thought Crean had a brain, but from Hawke to Rudd he seems to think anyone on that side of politics was some yobbo buffoon. I know I know, there are plenty of yobbo buffoons on the left, but jeez, what's Wilson Tuckey then? Buffoonery crosses the political divide.

But I digress. Actually, there's not much more to say. He had one shot at this memoir business and he fucked it up. It had no guts, no substance, no balls. Just like Ian Thorpe and Brodie Holland* I ask, "Where's the cock? Where's the cock? Give me some cooooooocccckkkk!" There's just none. This book is a document, not a memoir. It's a timeline. There's not even anecdotes! No bon mots! No gossip! No insight into his feelings or any indication that he can be moved by art, or nature, or anything apart from God and family. Mark my words, this book will be in the $2 bin by now. It has nothing to offer to the world or arts and letters, or hell, even the world of politics or Australian History. Economic historians might take a fleeting interest in it (luckily for Costello I did Economics at Uni so I took a little interest in some of it), but that's it.

Look, maybe there is something to him, and he just thought it was none of our business. If so, he shouldn't have bothered writing memoirs. Either you give it your all, or not bother. There is no audience for this book. It's a waste of paper.

I give it an E.

Divine intervention... FUCK. OFF.

Superstitious idiot.

PS: He mentions me, accidentally. Talking about Ron Walker's influence, he refers to the Commonwealth Games 'flying tram into the centre of the MCG' (landing on a Melway map of Melbourne) which I came up with, proposed to the Government, was rejected, but they did it anyway and someone else got paid for it. I HAVE THE DOCUMENTS TO PROVE THIS! (Note: They were legally entitled to take my idea... it was on the tender contract). Yes, 9 years later it's still a sore point.

* Rumour and innuendo. I'm not saying either are gay, I'm just saying that's what I hear on the grapevine.

A Spot Of Bother

2009-03-06T21:59:00.000-08:00

By Mark Haddon

This is the same bloke who wrote 'The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time' which I read four or five years ago and although I don't remember much about it, I do remember enjoying it. I wish I could say the same for this book, especially because the book was given to me by Pony Girl.

Self-loathing and self-obsessed middle class tossers getting agitated about stuff. That's kind of it.

I wouldn't have one character from this book over for tea.

It's all based around the extended Hall family and the build-up to the daughter's (second) wedding. There's the daughter herself who's a rotten bitch, her son from a previous marriage who talks way too well for a kid in a nappy, her husband-to-be who has nothing going for him except money, the gay son who's a prat, the infedelious bitch-mother and her hairy lover, and poor old Dad, George, who is going insane. He's the main character and perhaps the only one I had any pity for, because at least insanity is a reason and/or excuse for self-mutilation. The rest have no excuse, and if I was meant to feel empathy towards any of them (which I think I was supposed to) then either I failed the author, or the author failed me.

To be clear on this, 'bitch-mother' and 'gay prat' are just my summations. I think Haddon genuinely expected us (the readers) to like these people. But in my mind, they were a bunch of cunts and I was hoping that the last chapter had a line like, "And anyway, a plane crashed into the wedding and they all died except George."

This orgy of neuroses and self-loathing is not for me. It's for people who get it. It's for the people who are like that... who can't make up their mind, commitment-phobes, and yet at the same time they are ubermensches, narcissicsts, and also happen to be paranoid... who in any situation will first establish an esacpe route just in case, the people who play their cards close to their chest and will not or cannot express themselves for (unfounded) fear of retaliation - the people who say nothing at the exact time they should be communicating. They are the people that will love this book, because the Hall family is their template.

At least Token Gay had a small epiphany "... it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss about what other people thought." Though we had to wait until page 406 for this twat to turn, and what totally shat me is that his ex-boyfriend, who should have known better, rewarded Pratboy by magically coming back into his life.

In my experience, epiphanies aren't about righting old mistakes, they're about ensuring they don't happen again.

**

Haddon's writing style annoyed me too.

"Of course there were times when she worried. That Katie would never get a decent job. Or fall pregnant by accident."

What's with the fullstops?

He also does a Peter Carey.

"Aiden bawled Katie out... she resigned. And Patsy cried because people were shouting."

'Aiden' and 'Patsy' were never mentioned before that paragraph, and never mentioned again. I call it a 'Peter Carey' because he starts chapters with lines like "The blue jar was on the top shelf." What blue jar? Would it kill you to write, "A blue jar..."? Oh that's right, it's called writing.

But in this book's defence, it was a page-turner. The chapters were mostly very short - two or three pages would be an average, so the scenes were all like vignettes and because they jumped character to character I found myself having to keep reading so as I could get to what happened next. But it was page-turning in the same way Home & Away possibly is (I've never seen it). You watch four episodes in a row, and you have to find out what happens next.

The book was... engaging. I'll give it that.

I didn't hate the book as much as I hated the characters in it.

D.

*

Pony Girl is gone now. Not out of the country yet, but gone nonetheless. I'm a little shattered, and fragile. By jesus I loved that girl.

My family happen to be cracking up somewhat as well (maybe that's why the book resonated so negatively... we're all helping each other, and yet the family in the book were all too self-obsessed to particularly care about one another), I'm work-busy, and I'm lovesick as all Hell.

I'm about 6 books behind on this blog, so be prepared for a few entries. I find it good therapy to rant to strangers, thinly disguising my tantrums as art criticism.

The God Delusion

2009-01-27T00:22:00.001-08:00

By Richard Dawkins

Over the Christmas period I met a girl called Andromeda 3.4. We hit it off instantly and passionately. After only a short time she put the hard word on me and suggested we commit to being in a relationship, and, with much glee, I accepted. I had my first real girlfriend in more than two years; a particularly attractive and loving one at that.

My heart was fluttering and the sun was out. I felt like Superman.

Seriously, I was into her. No complaints other than superficial ones, like, for instance, she didn’t have a car... but that’s easy fixed. Get a car. I even contemplated buying her one. Problem solved. It’s not like there was anything that made me feel any concern that our fledgling relationship would come under any strain. She partied a bit hard for my liking too, but that didn’t really bother me. I don’t have to partake every time, and she did point out that when in a relationship she was more content to stay at home and watch telly, drink tea and smoke ciggies. My kinda chick.

So there I was. After sooking for two years about not being able to hold on to a relationship for more than a weekend, a very attractive and talented woman falls in love with me, sweeps me off my feet and I was over the moon and Jupiter too.

Dramatic pause.

Enter from stage left, Pony Girl.

It’s easy to be light and silly on a blog, but the words in The Kite Runner review (linked above) ring very true.

Pony Girl is back from overseas, is staying in the country briefly (up in the desert, seven hours from me), and heads to Europe indefinitely in April.

I ask you all: Would you swap a potential lifetime with a partner who you really like and may fall in love with, for just one night with one that you already truly love?

I did.

Well, I thought I did, but I ended up getting five nights with Pony Girl, and may get a few more in the Mallee Desert or down in Melbourne or here on the Surf Coast before she goes overseas.

To sleep with Pony Girl is one thing, to talk and laugh for hours and hours is another thing, but for even just one kind word, or a quick squeeze of the hand as she tells me she’s putting the kettle on, or for the privilege to put my arm around her shoulder in public and kiss her forehead, for the privilege to share a space and be partners even if that partnership has a use-by date, to hear her laugh, to make her laugh, for the thrill of even standing in a 5 metre radius of Pony Girl... for these things I broke Andromeda 3.4’s heart.

She deserved better than me.

She may choose to hate my guts. Understandably. I hate my own guts, but in order to man the fuck up I did what had to be done.

And Pony Girl? Don't think (as one good friend has done) that she is some sort of scarlet woman / homewrecker type who waltzed in to my life solely in order to waltz straight back out of it. She understands acutely the brevity of the situation. She hasn't tried to wriggle out of any responsibility towards it. She's far too smart and honourable for that. It's one of the many reasons why I admire her so.

I ain’t good enough a writer to give Pony Girl any justice, and besides, I get a bit tongue-tied near her, and the best I can come up with is this: She rocks.

I’m getting ready for another year of yearning for her. At least I know what to expect because I've already had a year's practice, and the beneficiaries will be the readers of this blog and TSFKA, because I get to go back to my shtick: “Woe is me, I can’t find a good woman, nobody loves me and I can’t cut straight with the chainsaw, I’m hopeless etc etc etc.”

I’m at my artistic best when I’m at my emotional worst. I grew up on vegemite toast and Dostoyevsky.

Anyway, this is a book review blog. The God Delusion was brilliant – finished it in November so sorry for the delay everyone – I give it a B+.

Packing Death

2008-12-10T18:09:00.000-08:00

By Lachlan McCulloch

In an earlier blog, I made mention of the fact I read a book solely because the marvellous woman who recommeded it had earlier gifted me some wonderful oral sex.

Similar story here, but just like the Ennuit Mute in my previous post, there was no oral. But there was the lure of it.

See, I had a third date with Project Manager Who Can Do The Splits. Hmm. That nickname is too long. Spiltgirl? Nope, connotations. The Splits? Sounds like a Radiohead album. Miss Splits? Ah, there we go. So anyway, I had a third date with Miss Splits last Sunday night and we went out to a restaurant and afterwards she invited me back to her house for a coffee and I of course said yes. Anyway, we drank coffee and talked and talked and at 11pm, facing a two and a half hour drive to get home, I said, "Well, I better hit the road."

Miss Splits: What?
Perseus: It's a two and a half hour drive, so I should really get going.
Miss Splits: You're kidding?
Perseus Q: Umm...
Miss Splits: It's the third date!
Perseus Q: Umm... oh, I see, umm...
Miss Splits: Oh, whatever. Jesus.

So in a scramble to change the topic I started to rummage through a pile of books next to the couch. They were all true crime and I started babbling away about how the the whole Underbelly thing interested me because it was so Melbourne and all, and anyway, she hand-picked this one out and said, "Oh, you'll really like this one," and I was too much on the backfoot to disagree so I said, "Oh really?" and she urged me to take it and read it so I did.

So as much as I stuffed up the third date, in order to return the book a fourth date is almost a given. It is scheduled for next week.

Did I mention she can do the splits?

So anyway, the book is a true story written by the undercover cop who infiltrated the Pettingill family and because of his excellent work a fair few drug dealers copped massive sentences. There were plenty of 'wearing wires' scenes and bits where they suspected he was undercover but he managed to talk them around and, you know, a couple of scenes were gripping and all, but I read it in under 4 hours and I've already forgotten the author's name.

Good on him though. I'm glad there's people like him around. He's the real hero. Not some schmuck who gets stranded in an ice cave and waits patiently for someone to rescue him. This bloke is an actual hero. But a writer he ain't. What we need is for supercops like this bloke to tell the story, then get Brian Castro or Christos Tsoilkas to write the story or something.

Still, his matter-of-fact writing style means this book can be consumed in one sitting, and would make excellent company beside the pool / sea / sprinkler / fish pond on a summer afternoon.

I'm not marking it.

The Seal Wife

2008-12-06T02:25:00.000-08:00

By Kathryn Harrison

(best-selling author of 'The Binding Chair' which I've never heard of)

This is the second in a series of five books I bought for $5 each at The Book Grocer.

Early 1900's, Alaska. A meteorological man from mainland USA gets posted to Alaska to work as a weather-measurer or whatever it's called. Meteorologist.

He meets a mute Ennuit woman, who I shall call Mute One. He follows her home. She won't let him go down on her, but she lets him fuck her as she plays with her clit until she orgasms. They do this every night for months. He takes food to her, she cooks it, they fuck. No oral.

Don't think I'm being crude for the sake of it by the way. It's what's in the book.

Anyway, the mute Ennuit never speaks because she's a mute. You know. And the science / meteorologist dude, well, he talks a lot about his work on pressure systems but he doesn't know if she understands English or not because a) she doesn't really seem to listen to him and b) she's a mute.

One day she vanishes.

So he gets drunk at a dance and fucks a hooker with missing teeth and the hooker steals his money.

Later, he goes back to the same hooker and this time when she tries to take his money he belts her.

Then he develops a crush on the woman who sings at the cinema. He finally meets her. She's a mute as well, so lets call her Mute Two. Though, she's not really a mute because she can sing. But she can't talk because of her bad stutter so she writes down what she wants to say. Anyhoo, he visits her regularly, then when her father goes away they start to have sex and the father suddenly rushes in and says (paraphrasing) "now that you've shagged my daughter you have to marry her." Turns out it was a sting. He doesn't want to marry Mute Two so he avoids her. She smashes up all his temperature measuring things and then she leaves town in violent circumstances.

Luckily for him, Mute One, the eskimo, comes back. He starts fucking her again, but still no oral. The end.

*

For the many Perseus Q scholars out there who study my every word, you'll be aware that in my excellent review of Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' I confessed that I didn't get it. However, I had the good manners to concede that maybe I was too dumb to get it.

Not so this time. I just didn't get it, and I don't think it has anything to do with my intelligence or lack thereof. I just think that whatever it was I was supposed to 'get' is either way too abstract or way too stupid, ergo, it can't be gotten unless you're a sprite or a fool.

Y'see, I can understand a man of civilisation falling for an Ennuit mute. I was ready to accept that this was a book of clashing cultures and the establishment of the USA as a highly conflicted but ultimately benchmarking nation. She could skin rabbits with her bare hands and sew like a Goddess, and he was a modern handyman - a man who could predict weather patterns and thus greatly assist the fledgling economy. The new meets the old and they work together. He's loud and she's quiet but together they present a dignified future for the nation.

I thought that was what I was reading.

But when Mute Two came into it (who wasn't an eskimo), suddenly there was a sexual pattern. The whole 'clash of cultures' fell away and instead I was reading a story of a man's sexual fascination with mutes... written by a woman.

Kathryn Harrison: You don't get men.

Unless! Unless, I've got it all wrong, and there's nothing to get. Maybe she's just into kinky mute sex. Maybe she fantasises about being a mute, and being fucked by a man of science (no oral). Maybe that's it.

So I googled 'sex with mutes' and found one gag about a 'Harposexual' being a person who prefers sex with mutes but will settle for a mime (I didn't laugh, but it is a clever joke) and one post at a sex blog that said this:

"I have a cock with a curve and I've heard no complaints which doesn't mean anything cause I have sex with mutes exclusively. mine doesn't curve left or right but it curves dramatically up. like a 45 degree angle. some girls have said it helped. In that case it sure as hell helped me."

Maybe bendy-cock here should meet up with Kathryn Harrison in a carpark somewhere.

*

The book was alright, I suppose. Meaningless, but, you know, I kept reading. The stuff about the weather was actually the most interesting bit.

I give it a D+

Leviticus

2008-11-14T01:42:00.000-08:00

By Some Idiot

*

This is the third and final part of my 'Apocalyptic Mess' series of reviews.

But before we get going, here's a slide show.

*

A sunny afternoon break at home... I might sit at the kitchen table.

Where's the lighter?

"And if the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the LORD be of fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtle doves, or of young pigeons. And the priest shall bring it unto the altar..." This is so boring.

"And when any will offer a meat offering unto the LORD, his offering shall be of fine flour; and he shall pour oil on it, and put frankincense thereon..." Hang on. Wouldn't the frankincense ruin the smell?

"And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thy offerings thou shalt offer salt." Well, God is clearer on that than he is about homsexuality. Note to the religious: Salt everything!

Fuck. This is like a cookbook from Hell.

Hmm, Leviticus 11:17 reckons that the 'little owl' is an abomination. Ramon Insertnamehere will agree.

Wait, so if you come across a leper, the Priest has to actually yell: "Unclean! Unclean!" God this is fucked. This is doing my head in.

Ooh! The cricket's on!

*

I am going to open my review of Leviticus (which I stupidly read three times, just trying to get my head around it) with a lengthy extract. Perhaps make a cuppa, settle yourself in, and take your time reading this. It is a large slab taken from Chapter 26 of Leviticus - the last chapter, and it is God's words. In this extract he explains what he will do to you if you don't abide by his rules, as detailed in the previous chapters of Leviticus (which I will come to after the extract.)

You ready? Here goes. Leviticus 26: 14-38

14 But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments;

15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant:

16 I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.

18 And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.

19 And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:

20 And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.

21 And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.

22 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.

23 And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;

24 Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.

25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.

26 And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.

27 And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me;

28 Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.

29 And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.

30 And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.

31 And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.

32 And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.

33 And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.

34 Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.

35 As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it.

36 And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth.

37 And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies.

38 And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.

Oh man, how cool is that? See, this is why I love the Bible. It is written exquisitely, and with such evilness and spite and it delivers such forceful language and concepts. If I encountered the most hideous and sick criminal, never would I have been able to conjure such an imaginative punishment for him as "...ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat."

And what a remarkable character the LORD, Yahweh, is! He's like Darth Vader multiplied by a zillion..."I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you." Bwahahahahaha!

It's powerful and inventive stuff and at times a delight to read; up there with Shakespeare even, and I am fortunate to be an atheist who can read this and feel nothing but entertained.

But of course, herein lies the problem. 'The Bible' is taken very seriously by many millions of people as a divine document. We swear by The Bible in court. It is placed in hotel rooms, in courts, in parliaments. It is 'holy' in the minds of many who, in its name, have fought wars, and killed, and maimed, and stopped homosexuals from getting married, and insisted they teach Creation in science classes.

And so the religious, if they do believe The Bible is in fact the divine word of God, must take God's threats seriously. He will chastise you for your sins, so you better do what he says to do, and avoid doing what he says not to do, otherwise you may have to eat your children.

But don't panic, because the preceding 25 chapters of Leviticus contains all his rules so if you study them, you'll know what to do and what not to do.

For instance: Homosexuals? Abomination! You're fucked. Very clear on this. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination." (18:22).

But the LORD is even clearer on who else is fucked, and they are no more or less fucked than the gays.

Those who get drunk in a church (10:8)
Those who touch a dead camel (11:8)
Those who eat a bat (11:9)
Those who touch a woman who has given birth in the last week (12:6)
Those men who don't have a shower after ejaculating (15:16)
Those who touch a woman menstruating (15:19-20)
Those who eat blood from anything (presumably, the meat should be cooked well) (17:10)
Those who ask a woman to get naked if she's menstruating (18:19)
Those who eat from a fruit tree that is not more than three years old (19:23)
Those with tattoos (19:28)
Those men who get naked with a woman that is menstruating (20:18)
Wizards (20:27)
Anyone who works on the Sabbath (too many references to list)

If you fall into any of the above categories you're likely to have God's face set against you and be slain before your enemies.

Please understand and appreciate this. The above rules (plucked from about 1,000 rules contained in Leviticus) are given no more or less importance than the homosexual issue, which brings me to something that has been noted many times before but I now want to give it a name: The Great Christian Squirm.

The Great Christian Squirm (GCS) is prevalent amongst all the religious except for maybe those nutters who hang about with the 'God Hates Fags' signs at US army funerals (they are the only True Believers I can name).

The GCS is when anybody both religious and who think the Bible is holy, whether they be fundamentalist or recreational, pick and choose. "Homosexuality is wrong," they may say, but have they eaten fruit from a tree less than three years old? Have they touched their wives after giving birth? Because as I say, Leviticus is clear on both topics. So they squirm out of it by saying, "Oh, but that's the Old Testament, and you have to look at the Ancient Greek translation of the word 'fruit', oh and Jesus changed everything and umm, you have to put Leviticus in context of the times and ummm..."

You can't have it both ways, dudes. Either the book is the Holy and Divine Word of the everlasting creator LORD, or it isn't. Either you take it ALL, or you take none of it, so if you even dare say, "It is okay to touch my wife after she gives birth," then I say to you, "Then you cannot have Creation, you cannot have The Ten Commandments, you cannot have Noah's Ark and you cannot have the Resurrection."

It is also in Leviticus that slavery is given the go-ahead:

"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession." (25:44-45)

I would suggest that all religions, at least in Western society, these days find slavery abhorrent. But there it is, in the Holy Bible. Watch them squirm. Watch them tell you that that bit no longer applies, but that other bit does.

Sorry Christians. If you're telling me that Mary was a virgin, then I can have slaves.

*

As a stand-alone book Leviticus is a dismal faiure. Moses the dumb-arse is on Mt Sinai and God is telling him his rules. That's kinda it. Chapter 26 with all the evil bits is the only entertaining part because the rest of it is rule after rule after rule. It's an empty book - empty of relevancy, empty of entertainment, empty of art. The first eleven chapters is all about burnt offerings... how to slaughter the lamb or the goat or the ox or whatever, which parts you can eat and which parts you can't, when to offer a lamb and when to offer a turtle dove and so on. There's a few chapters on leprosy and boils, a bit about some extra piety required of the Priests and repeated over and over and over is shit about the Sabbath. I tell ya: Moses must have had a keen memory to remember all these rules. It's not like he was taking dictation or anything.

There's only one 'story' in the whole book, in chapter 24, concerning a little half-caste kid in the tribe who blasphemes. God tells Moses to have the kid murdered. "And Moses spoke to the children of Israel , that they should bring forth him that had cursed out of the camp, and stone him with stones. And the children of Israel did as the LORD commanded Moses." (24:23)

Leviticus is of no interest to anyone really, except for maybe orthodox Jews who want to stick to their kosher cooking and need to know when all the holy days on the Jewish calendar are. That's all it is. The whole fucking Leviticus is just one boring and irrelevant rule after another rule.

There are some nice rules that God laid down, though they are few and far between. One which I can't find now was a very direct commandment to be nice to kids and I appreciated that, even though in Exodus God was quite happy for kids to be murdered as long as they were Gyppos. There was also some stuff about looking after family and neighbours if they encounter financial misfortune... you know, like, give them a job, or lend them money, and feed them, and that was nice, but, all in all, it was mainly about how to prepare meat. That's the over-riding and dominant feature of Leviticus, followed a close second by Sabbath rules.

So why did I read it three times? Well, bereft of art, entertainment and relevancy, I found it interesting that we, us humans, as a people, as a species, are capable of believing this stuff to be Holy. I had to keep reading to appreciate how truly bizarre we are. Humans are a fantastic bunch. We are capable of anything.

Night

2008-10-16T02:15:00.000-07:00

By Elie Wiesel

This is Part Two of a three part series of reviews sub-titled 'Apocalyptic Mess'.

It is also Part One of a series of five reviews of books I purchased for only $5 a book at the wonderful Book Grocer.

This is an account of the writer's time in a Nazi concentration camp.

I am not Jewish, or religious. I am not German, or Polish. I am not an ethnic supremacist, or belong to a persecuted minority. I am not a child of war, I have not lived in a war zone, I have not been sent to a war. I have not lost any member of my immediate family to a violent death.

Who am I to comment on this story?

I can only understand the holocaust in either political or philosophical terms. And of course by 'understand' I mean 'not understand'.

I'm just another voice who in exasperation, at the loss of anything else to add just says, "Lest we forget."

In my review of Blood Meridian I complained that, "It describes an implausible humanity, so detatched from the land and the laws of existance that it fails to inspire any form of reminisce. It is unrecognisable as coming from Earth. It is not our story."

That's why this book is so horrible. Because it is our story. It comes from Earth. People reasoned a genocide. They used the word 'solution'. Unlike the cartoon directionless psychopaths in Blood Meridian, these people had a reason for their actions. Some people, in time, made a reason for genocide.

I can't score this book. I won't.

This is not a book to read because you want to, it's a book to read because you have to.

Blood Meridian

2008-10-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

By Cormac McCarthy

This review is part one of a series of three reviews to be posted in the next few days under the sub-title ‘Apocalyptic Mess’.

Being that I discovered McCarthy early in the year via ‘No Country For Old Men’ and ‘The Road’, and being that I also fostered an appreciation for Western movies in the past six months or so, it seemed fitting to wind up these two interests with a western by Cormac McCarthy (before moving on to my next phase, whatever that is).

I was looking forward to this book, especially because many McCarthy fans (including our comrade ‘Tiger In A Tube’ ) nominated it as his best work.

Here it is: An amoral 14 year old sociopath known only as ‘the kid’ joins a mob of violent scalp-hunters, lead by a sadistic maniac called Glanton and an enigmatic Kurtz-like hairless man known as ‘the judge’ who may or may not exist.

By jesus it was violent.

...one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew...

And gory.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts. Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out of their grinning mouths.

McCarthy dishes up many impossibly long sentences.

They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren plan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

And describes a landscape that is alien to me, I think.

They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian...

Using words I’ve never heard (dictionary.com and wiki - thankyou).

Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows...

*

The book is gripping and moving but that’s all I can say in support of it. They're like a band of Ivan Milats lead by Kierkegaard’s evil twin from a parallel universe running around mid 19th Century USA/Mexico brewing their own mini-holocaust by senselessly slaughtering and scalping Mexicans, pilgrims and Injuns. Did I mention how violent it is?

The judge is the best character, even though his soliloquies make little sense, and even though he may not exist (is he the kid's mind's creation? Is he Satan?). He’s a bisexual, a pedophile, he's highly educated, multi-lingual and one of the more sadistic characters of fiction. His habit of making sketches of artefacts (whether they be an old shack or an animal or a child or whatever) before killing/destroying them is a fascinating quirk.

Coming across ancient Indian rock-carvings:

The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book...

...then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scrappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been.

His only explanation for this is:

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

And in relation to his extreme sadism, he offers:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.

But the main chracater is the kid who, in the absence of anything better to do, joins this gang of murderers. We follow the kid’s formative years but when he joins the gang, we actually lose him as a central character for about 150 pages. At first this bugged me, but I realised in the end that it was McCarthy’s greatest literary achievement in the book. By dropping the kid out of the narrative we could watch everything that was happening just as the kid was experiencing it. By the time he's freed from the gang and we’re back into his mind, we understand his trauma and total inability to cooperate with the world. Maybe McCarthy shut us out from his thoughts for 150 pages because he had none. Maybe. For, had he got to figurin' things, maybe he'd make a lousy genocidal maniac. Or maybe McCarthy just wanted us to concentrate on the horror.

*

I can see why the book is lauded. It’s a massive and profound work. But, I have a problem with it.

Germaine Greer in her brilliant essay, ‘Whitefella Jump Up’ (I don't care what you say or whether you agree with her essay or not... Greer’s concept is brilliant and important) she posits that:

We hate this country because we cannot allow ourselves to love it. We know in our hearts' core that it is not ours.

But offers this as a way of overcoming it:

If we climbed out of the recreational vehicle and sat on the ground, we might begin to get the message that we can't afford to hear, the message that, since contact, Aborigines have never stopped transmitting. The land is the source of everything;

I argue that Greer is a writer who speaks in the language of myth. I might write an essay on this one day. In short, my summary of her life’s work is that she talks in an ancient and abstract tongue, and too many attack her because they try to understand her in the context of current affairs, hard news and facts. It’s not what she’s about – or at least, it’s not what she means to me. When Greer said, “The animal kingdom got its revenge,” she was not saying (as the hopelessly stupid Helen Razer insinuated) that the animal kingdom got together and hatched a plan to kill Steve Irwin. She was in fact rising to Irwin’s own mythological ubermensch ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ with words appropriate to that mythical superhero's death. They got their revenge on the Crocodile Hunter, not the husband / father.

Same goes with her use of the words (above) ‘hate’ and ‘land is the source of everything’.

I know what she means. At least I think I do. We are as much a product of the land we inhabit as we are our genetic breeding and our expreiences and circumstance. We store within us all that is abstract and transcedental as well as material in these matters. And yet, we deny it, or at best, try to ignore it, but we cannot escape it.

As such, we are a cocktail of both nature's peril and beauty.

Which brings me back to Blood Meridian. I cannot accept such amorality. It is inferred that both circumstance and land created these monsters, but there was no let up. Glanton cared for a dog. That's all we got. The rest cared for nobody and nothing. They existed trapped in one dimension only - as psychopathic maniacs and had no other traits. A glimpse of camaraderie here, a hint of self-awareness there, all to be eradicated a minute later. It’s not good enough to say: “As long as they were employed to slaughter injuns, they couldn’t afford another dimension”, because, hell, even Ivan Milat may have liked ice-cream or Bon Jovi or something.

In a way, they act on the Greer model – they tear up the country that is not theirs by slaughtering the people that are its custodians, but unlike the Greer model, there is no redemption or lesson, nothing to reflect upon, no message in the dirt or the wildflowers, no second to sigh at a sunset or admire the guile of the wolf or the resilience of the quarrey.

The nearest I’ll come to saying something religious is to concede that there is something in the dirt upon which we are raised that melds to us. Human nature is inextricably linked with nature full stop. Physics, biology, geology are siblings to philosophy, art and human experience.

Maybe that's why my tolerance of religion and new-age spiritualism is ZERO, and why I find it all to be abhorrent, childish nonsense. Because it assumes we belong to Jesus, or the Lord, or to some other sentient designer such as the new-age cosmos with its reliance on fate, destiny, 'meant to happen' fucking garbage junk philosophy, and that souls or spirits exist on higher plains extraneous to the planet on which we are rooted to... all these beliefs, whether they be Christian, Islamic or Wiccan remove us from the land, from our experience, from our instinct and most importantly, from the magic that is life. They are trying to relocate us to a place that cannot and does not exist.

We cannot help but belong to the land - the laws governing our existance insist on this and the human mind on some transcedental level knows it and works with it. The same laws apply to all of us and we offer varying results and interpretations back. Blood Meridian lacks this. Just like the Old Testament, it peddles an absolute that's beyond our potential. It describes an implausible humanity, so detatched from the land and the laws of existance that it fails to inspire any form of reminisce. It is unrecognisable as coming from Earth. It is not our story.

But it was cracking entertainment.

B Minus.

Glossary just from the extracts above (fairdinkum, every page had some word I didn't know).

Midden: Dunghill or refuge heap.

Fontanel: One of the spaces, covered by membrane, between the bones of the fetal or young skull.

Viscera: The organs in the cavities of the body, esp. those in the abdominal cavity.

Spume: Foam, froth, or scum.

Weft: A woven fabric or garment

Groundsel: Any composite plant of the genus Senecio, esp. S. vulgaris, a common weed having clusters of small yellow disk flowers without rays.

Zinnia: Any of several composite plants of the genus Zinnia, native to Mexico and adjacent areas, esp. the widely cultivated species Z. elegans, having variously colored, many-rayed flower heads.

Gentian: any of several plants of the genera Gentiana, Gentianella, and Gentianopsis, having usually blue, or sometimes yellow, white, or red, flowers, as the fringed gentian of North America.

Gibbous: (of a heavenly body) Convex at both edges, as the moon when more than half full.

Spancel: a noosed rope with which to hobble an animal, esp. a horse or cow. In his case, he has made a verb of it.

Chert: A compact rock consisting essentially of microcrystalline quartz

*

Apologies to Tiger In A Tube because this is the second novel listed in his Top Eleven of which I've had ill words to say. But he'll forgive me because us Richmond supporters, in the lack of success, only have dignity left.

True Grit

2008-09-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

By Charles Portis

Loved it.

I've been going through a John Wayne phase. You can buy his films cheap if you buy them in bulk. Across three collections, I scored about 30 the Duke's films for just $80. For a little under $3 a film, it's great value. I've been going through them slowly in the past few months - some are absolutley fantastic (The Searchers and Rio Bravo are standouts so far) and some are fucking retarded (Rio Lobo... write it down; write the words 'Rio Lobo' down, commit them to memory, and make a pledge to never see that movie). The other night I got to 'True Grit' and was about to hit 'play', but then remembered I owned the book. "What the Hell," says I, "I'll watch another film tonight, and actually read True Grit before I watch the flick," (this then lead to the Rio Lobo disaster of 2008. Seriously, I can't begin to describe how pathetic Rio Lobo is. As a 19 year old girl I met recently would say, "It was AIDS.").

The book starts: "People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood..." and from that very first few words to the very last, the book was UNPUTDOWNABLE.

It is told in the voice of the fourteen year old girl, Mattie, whose father was killed by one of his workers, a man called Tom Chaney, "...a short man with cruel features."

Mattie, though young, has an exacting or calculating manner about her to the point that I surmised she had Aspbergers, and with a mix of that need for exactitude along with guts, skill, wits and a Presbyterian's old-testament longing for revenge, she doggedly hunts down Tom Chaney.

I'm not being flippant on the Aspberger's line either. I don't know if that's just the way Portis writes or whether he's brilliantly skilled at bringing a unique young girl's voice to light, but, Mattie is brilliantly formed, so unique, in a kind of manner that's not quite right but nor is it bad, or wrong, or off-putting. No, Mattie is just, well, umm, not cold as such, but full on. Fortunately, her single-mindedness is taking us on a great adventure with what could only be described as a noble cause... the taking down of a violent killer in revenge for her father's death.

To hunt down the man, she enlists the services of a mean Marshal renowned for having 'true grit'. This is 'Rooster' Cogburn (the John Wayne part), and along with a Texas Ranger by the name of LaBoef (who is hunting the same man for killing a Senator back in Waco, Texas), the three hunters go deep into Indian-held territory.

It's a classic Western. It's also a classic moral tale, a classic chase, a classic adventure - it's romance free but sexy as fuck. It's got shootouts, dead horses, skeletons, rattlesnakes, Indians, double-crossers, executions... everything you want.

They talk mean. The Texas Ranger wants the killer to pay for the high-profile crime of murdering a Senator (and his dogs) back in Texas but young Mattie wants him hanged for the crime of murdering her simple and honest father.

"I want him to know he is being punished for killing my father. It is nothing to me how many dogs and fat men he killed in Texas."

"You can let him know that," said Rooster. "You can tell him to his face. You can spit on him and make him eat sand out of the road. You can put a ball in his foot and I will hold him while you do it. But we must catch him first."

I like the way Portis brings in characters for cameos (if you ever read it, watch out for the bloke 'Stonehill' who in just a few pages becomes one of the best fictional characters I've known). I like the way Mattie interacts with these cameos. The night before she leaves, she decides to sleep in the stable with her horse Little Blackie rather than waste money at the boarding-house for just a few hours' sleep (her financial acumen is a recurring theme).

The watchman was an old man. He helped me to shake out the dusty quilt that was on the bunk. I looked in on Little Blackie at his stall and made sure everything was in readiness. The watchman followed me around.

I said to him, "Are you the one that had his teeth knocked out?"

"No, that was Tim. Mine was drawn by a dentist. He called himself a dentist."

"Who are you?"

"Toby."

I can smell Hemingway...

Rooster, though mean and violent, has a heart under it all. Discovering two young boys torturing a mule, he frees the mule, gives the boys a' whippin' and says to one of them, "See that you mend your ways, boy, or I will come back some dark night and cut off your head and let the crows peck your eyeballs out."

It's at times a violent book, and perhaps the only time we ever get a sense that young Mattie feels fear is when an interrogation of two young cattle-thieves goes wrong. One of them, Moon, who was shot earlier, starts to spill the beans, and suddenly the situation spirals out of control. Fingers are chopped off, guns are fired, people are stabbed and Mattie records, "My thought was: I am better out of this. I tumbled backward from the bench and sought a place of safety on the dirt floor."

As Moon lays dying, he talks of his brother.

I said, "Do you want us to tell your brother what happened to you?"

He said, "It don't matter about that. He knows I am on the scout. I will meet him later walking the streets of Glory."

**

That'll do for extracts. You have to read it. It can be done in one sitting. One rainy afternoon, or as I did it, one empty evening tanked on coffee and Dunhills with an old cat beside me, occassionally strirring.

I wonder what it is I suddenly, in my late 30's, like so much about the Western? For starters, I like the names of things. Daniel Webster's Cigars, Stonehill's Livery Stable, The Grangers Trust Co. of Topeka, Kansas, and my favourite in this book, a reference to a company called 'The Great Arkansas River, Vicksburg & Gulf Steamship Company'.

I like the simple food they eat. Oh, I love gourmet chefs' stream-of-consciousness "agitated greens with Nicaraguan virgin jus" type stuff, but I also like meat and three veg. I think I even like it more, the older I get, and as these western stereotypes range across the land, whether the law or the lawless, they drink their coffee in the morning, their whiskey at night, and in between there's some salted pork, bread and maybe a bite of corn. Many smoke.

These Western stereotypes also have a pleasing mix of anarchy and freedom, but tinged with a sense of community, hard-work, morality and 'what's right and wrong'. Oh, there's a bit too much God-fearin' and that Old Testament rhetoric but I'm prepared to look past it and suggest that for then, back then, in those times, it was intellectual solace (no excuse now).

In the end maybe it's the stereotype itself that attracts me. I spent much of my late 20's banging on about post-modernism, about challenging the hegemony, bringing down stereotypes, throwing history away - stomping on it first - and starting anew with a Foucaultian Utopia where gender, race, class, sexuality, sanity and culture hardly exist beyond their entry in some dusty Museum's ledger.

But now suddenly I'm all, "Fuck it. A man's a man."

That's not denying variations thereof, nor does it condone violence or the evil that men do. Hell, it's the opposite. Sheikh Al Hilaly and his 'uncovered meat' fable diminishes the manliness of him and his flock as far as I'm concerned because real men act like real men, not like budding Satans with unbridled lusts for domination.

But saying a man is a man is a man is just saying, ecce homo, and, well, that's just how it is, and we all, deep down, know what 'being a man about things' infers.

It's the Western that right now exemplifies this for me, and this book is a highly entertaining Western.

I give it a B+.

(PS: The film 'True Grit' was a bit of a let-down of course. It was okay, but, it was largely ruined by a completely inapparopriate soundtrack (which seemed to never stop) that was lithe, light and fluffy - totally at odds with the themes of the story. Also, and I guess it's just because of when it was made and what audience they hoped to reach out to, the film, rather ironically lacked the very thing it promised most: grit.)

Frankenstein

2008-09-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

By Mary Shelley

THE PROS

The story itself is fantastic. Obviously, we all know the basics. Brilliant but mad Dr. Frankenstein makes a monster out of spare parts, it goes on a murderous rampage, the doctor gets on to the drugs, cue moral lesson #17 “Be careful what you wish for...” , some parallels with Actaeon getting eaten by his own hounds and about a hundred other metaphors, life lessons and subtexts ranging from Christian sexual dysfunction to, “Oh no, I ruined my soufflé... I’m Frankenstein!”.

But my knowledge of the tale was based on the B-grade cartoons and movies of my childhood, and The Munsters, and I was pleasantly surprised that at every corner I really didn’t know what was going to happen next.

I always thought Dr. Frankenstein was an old man. Oh no, in the original, he’s a gifted young University student when he brings the monster to life. I also thought he had a dumb hunchbacked assistant. Nope. And I also thought he ran through cemeteries gathering spare parts. Wrong again. In fact, Frankenstein is very vague as to how he gathered the parts, saying only that he, “...collected bones from charnel-houses...” and, “...the dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials,”. As for the process of bringing a monster into the world, he simply announces that one day he realised that he “...possessed the capacity of bestowing animation,” and, “...having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began.” That's about the sum total of information we get regarding his creation. As for the particular science of the creation, we get nothing. Nothing at all. Still, good on Mary Shelley for not boring us with complex scientific wish-wash, and in a way, the lack of science and procedure helps the story chug along (something Hollywood needs to re-learn... yeah, I’m looking at you George Lucas).

The night Frankenstein finally animates his monster, his first reaction is: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?... Breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Cue memory of creations gone wrong in our own lives: In my case it was my Year 7 Woodwork assignment. I spent months creating a swan. I chiselled its wings, smoothed its face, put a little of myself into every sandpaper scrub and when I handed it in the teacher said, “What is it? A turtle? I’ll give you a C.” The next project was a tray. I failed, and started to become more bookish.

Anyway, after the monster comes to life, what does Dr. Frankenstein do? Instead of immediately putting the monster down, he runs into his bedroom and goes to sleep, leaving the monster to fend for itself. The most awesome moment of the book then takes place. The monster works its way into his bedroom.

“He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped...”

Even reading it now, and knowing what we do of the poor monster’s fate, it’s a powerful scene. What’s both tragic, and in its way quite hilarious, is that Frankenstein not only escapes, but he actually kind of just gets on with his life for a few years, only occasionally wondering what ever happened to that monster thing he created.

We discover later that the monster at that point didn’t even know what he was, or what anything was, including ‘life’, which reminds me of the great monologue by the whale, suddenly ‘invented’ and dropped from the sky in Hitchhiker’s... (I fear this reminder also exposes me as part-nerd).

“Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my... well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a... tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what's this roaring sound, whooshing past what I'm suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I'm dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There's an awful lot of that now isn't it? And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me? Hello Ground!”

Heh.

But back to the horrror.

The fact the monster was smiling at his creator makes the scene all the more tormenting to me.

So anyway, a few years later, Frankenstein’s little brother gets murdered and by chance he discovers the monster was the murderer.

A confrontation occurs between Frankenstein and his monster; the monster demands a wife, otherwise there’ll be more killing. Frankenstein acquiesces, but changes his mind just before completing the bride, so he chucks the bride-parts into the ocean.

Of course the monster gets mighty pissed off and goes on his murderous rampage. The story then takes us as far as the North Pole where there’s plenty more excitement to be had.

There’s a great scene on Frankenstein’s wedding night, where instead of screwing his wife (who he’s been waiting to marry since childhood) he instead patrols the corridors of the inn, high on drugs, carrying a gun and ready to shoot the monster. I couldn’t help but detect a fear of sex in the whole scene and in fact, once I got to that bit, I realised that on just about every page of this book there’s plenty of subtext to rummage through, as well as some impeccably created mythology that we can use to both reflect and admire.

The fact that much of the imagery from this original tale still permeates our culture is testament to its many layers.

Also, published in 1818, I wonder if it's the first book to ever provide us with the oft-employed horror cliché of a lightning bolt illuminating a spine-chilling visage for an instant?

“I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon...”

In fact, there’s a lot of horror clichés that could probably be traced back to this book and of course Stoker’s excellent ‘Dracula’, but I suppose back then when they were released they weren’t clichés at all. One imagines this book would have once been considered truly horrifying.

THE CONS

Oh, it’s all so POMPOUS. Unlike Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ , it’s ability to scare is diminished by the pompous upper-class twittery of the language Shelley writes in.

For starters, we can’t discern between characters and narrators because they all talk in exactly the same Lord Snot way as each other.

The whole Frankenstein family speak in identical Pompous Twat... and for fuck’s sake, SO DOES THE MONSTER. After going missing for a few years after his 'birth', the first time we hear words come from his mouth he sounds like he has a silver spoon rammed deep up his arse:

“All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.”

Now, an eloquent monster is fair enough, but it’s a great leap of faith I’m forced to make that in only two years he has gone from ‘Ugga ugga ugga’, to learning the alphabet by eavesdropping on a family ,and then, for his first book, reading Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ (no joke, that’s how the monster got to be so well spoken in the course of a couple of years). But when Frankenstein responds with:

“Abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art! The tortures of Hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes!”.. I began to realise that Shelley only had one style of writing, and it was coming out of the mouths of not just these two characters, but every other character as well, and the narrator(s). There doesn’t appear to be one linguistic differential between any of ‘em.

Add to that, Frankenstein is a fucking girl and it’s like Shelley grabbed a discarded Jane Austen character from the Austen family’s garbage bin, put a dick on it, called it a mad scientist and made it her central character.

Another thing that bugged me was its lack of sexual tension. The Magic Faraway Tree has more eroticism than this book, and so does Toadie from Neighbours and that tea-towel on my kitchen bench. Like, there’s none. You’d think, given that Shelley used to hang out with the likes of her libertine husband Percy and his best mate, the sister/bear-fucking Goth pinup boy Lord Byron, she’d give us a heaving bosom or a nod to someone’s virility or even a well-turned ankle, or a sweaty bicep, but no, it’s all just so chaste. In a sense, I ended up coming to the conclusion that the whole book was one giant reflection of Mary's own sexual dysfunction and/or disinterest, and I offer this un-researched and ill-informed scurrilous piece of gossip: Mary Shelley was a dud root.

Perhaps her only sexual reference was attributing these words to one of the narrators (a sea-captain who finds Dr. Frankenstein floating on a slab of ice) in a letter to his sister... “I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil... I desire the company of a man...”

So Shelley has a bit of gay fantasy, but, you know, that line was on Page 4, and that was the end of that!

I can’t help but compare it to Dracula, which was both scary and sexy. Frankenstein is neither. It’s a little creepy at times, and even sad, but never really chilling and certainly not steamy.

Aside from the monster’s demand (not desire, it was only a demand) for a wife, there is zero reference to anything even vaguely approaching sex and in that, the book lacks a certain spunk. Even death is treated in a most inartistic and mundane fashion. So analysis of our two favourite themes in art, in life, in being a human – sex and death – are absent from this book (which is the complete opposite of the Holy Bible, which, is slowly dawning on me as the greatest documentation of our human lusts and our fear of/ obsession with death... and yet the pious amongst us would claim that the very opposite is true of these two publications).

Once this lack of primal themes started to sink in with me, Shelley’s Frankenstein started to bug me. Bataille would have not got past page 3.

**

I’ll leave the conclusion to the monster himself, in perhaps his finest soliloquy. This one actually affected me strongly because it reminded me of people I have met in my life - the ones that tend to fuck things up for everyone else.

“I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. .. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself...”

**

I give it a C Minus.

Mary Shelley - a dud root

Top 11 Novels

2008-09-16T22:13:00.001-07:00

It's been a while. This happens to me. About once a year, I stop reading for a month or so. I read newspapers, and sports statistics, and get into the footy finals and stuff like the Olympics and that, and the whole book thing winds down. But, I'll have two new book reviews next week... maybe even three (I'm on a novel, a science book and the Bible all at once).

In the meantime, because nobody asked me to, I'm going to be one of those 'list' people and I'm going to have a stab at my Top 11 novels. I have linked them all to Amazon, just in case you are swept away with interest and feel like buying them for yourselves (but please try to buy them at Readings first). I've also linked the authours to their wiki entry.

1. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

2. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

3. One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

4. The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

5. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima

6. Journey To The End Of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

7. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner

8. L'assamoir by Emile Zola

9. Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis

10. The Tree Of Man by Patrick White

11. Blindness by Jose Saramago

(Apologies to George Orwell, Red Badge Of Courage, every other Dostoyevsky novel, Auto da Fe, some Nabakov books, Enid Blyton, The Enormous Room, Steinbeck, For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Wizard of Oz... you all made the shortlist)

There's only so much one can say about another's list, so instead, please feel free to put your own Top 10 list in the comments (novels only).

If you think my list sucks, well, get fucked.

Madman's Island

2008-08-03T04:13:00.000-07:00

By Ion L. Idriess

I was by myself last night because I wanted to watch Richmond play Geelong with no distractions and I had to stay at home anyway because I had work to do. Anyway, Richmond got hammered, and some locals had earlier asked me to go the pub later on.

I said, “I’ve lived in this town for two years and been to the pub only five times. For a reason. I hate it. It’s a cesspool of drunken fuckwits and the chicks are bogan slappers and half the guys wear those pants that are halfway down their legs like retards and surely their mothers couldn't sink so low as to love them... but thank you anyway for the kind offer.”

But after the footy I decided to man the fuck up and go to the fucking pub ‘cos I live in a small Australian town and it's What You Do.

All the people I knew there were dancing. Ugh. I didn’t recognise the music. It was that ‘RnB’ stuff that sounds like cats dying on top of a synthesiser. So I got chatting to this nice couple I know that blessedly were not dancing, and the bloke had his sister visiting. She was a journalist, and a fucking beautiful one at that. We got stuck into the wine, and argued about Oxford Commas.

“No!” she said of the Oxford Comma.

“You can’t stop us,” I said, “Me and my fellow Oxford Commarians. We’re coming. We will pillage, transform, and revolutionise the printed word”. Ah, it was highbrow for a while... and I was thinking, "Jeez, the pub's shit but I've found a nugget of gold with blonde hair and black stockings."

But then it turned. It descended into wine-induced madness, so much so that neither of us could speak properly and the next thing I knew I was playing pool with the journalist’s brother and some bogans from Colac and then the next thing I knew I was in bed alone and the bed was spinning faster than a Sunbeam blender.

I didn’t even try to pick her up. I’m an idiot. Though a rejection was probable, I shoud have at least given it a shot. But even if I got lucky, I would have fallen off. Her.

I don’t drink very well. I like coffee and cigarettes, and ecstasy, but if there was no alcohol left in the world I wouldn’t give a fat rat’s arse.

So anyway the point of all this is that today, Sunday, I couldn't muster the energy or will to do just about anything, and that included reading the two highbrow books I’m currently devouring. So, I crawled to the local second-hand bookstore, grabbed this book at random in the ‘Antiquarian Australian Fiction’ section (attracted by the title), brought it home, put myself in pyjamas, got the potbelly going and read all 238 pages in one sitting fuelled by Lipton’s Tea, Nescafe Espresso (the green label one), a pack of Dunhills and ongoing tomato/avocado on toast.

It was a fucking ripper. Set in the early 1920’s, and allegedly a true story with only minor embellishments, the main character Jack and this other bloke called Charlie are mining prospectors who are dropped off on Howick Island (north of Cairns) to follow up a rumour that there's tin on the island. The boat that drops them off on the desolated island is due to pick them up in a month.

But things go awry.

1. There’s a little bit of tin, but not enough to warrant a mining plant.
2. Charlie, a WW1 veteran, forgot to bring his medication which causes severe mood swings.
3. Charlie secretly decided he was never going to leave the island anyway – he wants to be alone for the rest of his life.
4. The boat doesn't turn up to collect them.

Charlie is the ‘madman’ acknowledged in the title. Without his medication, and scarred by a combination of WW1 and roaming the country by himself (sometimes living long periods with isolated Aboriginal tribes), as well as his physical sickness, he goes mad and tries to kill Jack.

Jack, who is only young, has to hide the whole time over the other side of the island and teach himself how to hunt and fish and survive in the mangrove forests, and also avoid being killed by crocodiles, sharks, stingrays, sand-fly swarms and even opium smugglers at one point, as well as his nutcase fellow island dweller.

He spends every night alone, hiding in a cave, a little scared.

“...on very windy nights a vast murmuring would come sighing over the island from the mangrove forest. In gusts, it would come, in sobbing shrieks that died away among the boulders. No wonder the legends of primitive man are full of ghostly things.”

Charlie’s madness is cyclical. The best twists in the story come when Jack, who spies on Charlie for safety, observes that he’s calm. When he’s calm, Jack actually goes and hangs out with him for a few days and they get along just fine but once he notices the mood swings starting to come on (probably PTSD or something) he has to go over the other side of the island and hide for his life because Charlie comes looking to kill him.

It’s riveting! It’s a gem!

But more importantly than the story itself, is the act of reading a cliff-hanging adventure novel on a chilly Sunday afternoon in your pyjamas by the fire. I ask you, is there a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon? I may not have had the pleasure of shagging the journalist, but what compensation!

God I love books.

I give this one a B.

In finishing, here’s a scan of one of the pages.

Two things to note.

The illustrator obviously didn’t bother to read the book. Jack often mentions the length of his beard but the picture shows a freshly-shaven man.

Secondly, I love seeing notes other people have written in second-hand books. I laughed and laughed when I saw the graffiti.

Fahrenheit 451

2008-07-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

By Ray Bradbury

On the one hand, he did well to suggest that attention spans would degenerate and 'stories' would become more compact over time. On the other hand, I think he got it completely wrong to suggest that 'stories' would disappear and be considered dangerous. If anything, the opposite is true.

I generally don't dig sci-fi novels. They mostly offer implausible futures.

To be truthful, I didn't really get it. The robot dogs were pretty cool though.

C-.

Auto Fiction

2008-07-02T03:40:00.000-07:00

By Hitomi Kanehara

Fuck me, this was just fucken shithouse.

The writer Kanehara is in her in early 20's and this is her second novel. Apparently the first was marvellous and she's 'an exciting new voice' TM. Lord help us.

The book is about a young writer called Rin, in her early 20's, who has written one novel and is considered 'an exciting new voice'. You see where this is going. Anyway, in the book, her publisher asks her to write a book of Autofiction, which is a kind of 'disguised autobiography' - you know, autobiography posing as fiction. Presumably, this book is the result.

The character Rin is a repugnant harpy. Now, there are two options for us to consider:

1 - Hitomi Kanehara is clever, and the character 'Rin' is nothing like her at all.
2 - The character of Rin is exactly like Hitomi Kanehara.

If it's option 2, then Kanehara is the last artist on Earth I'd like to meet, and that includes that knob who cuts himself and spits black ink... Mike Parr. Knob.

If it's option 1, then Kanahara has still failed, because she hasn't written a delightful book about a self-absorbed twat, she has written a horrible book about a self-absorbed twat.

Shakespeare creates bad people, but they are interesting to read about.

Kanehara has created a bad person, and all I could think whilst reading the book was, "Why the hell would anyone write a book about someone so shithouse?" You know, I know people like this and I don't want anything to do with them in real life, and then I got stuck with this bint for 200 pages.

The character has no redeeming features. None. Well, she's allegedly good looking, but that doesn't help. She does admit she's self-absorbed, but that doesn't excuse her behaviour. We also find out about her past, and yeah, some bad things happened, her ex beat her up, her parents were controlling, she had a drinking problem, but you know, other people suffer these things and don't turn into vacuous and arrogant morons like this Rin character.

At least Richard III was clever and interesting. Rin is neither. She's a horrid little brat and I didn't care two hoots whether she existed or not.

But her worst crime is not her stupid and childish paranoia or her penchant for emotional-blackmail, it is her irrelevance.

For example:

"There I go again! I lied again. I'm the same as Shah. I'm a liar. I'm a fool. It's not like the elements required for telling the truth about Shah's lie aren't here. There's still the thumping bass sound coming through to the room, but it isnt so loud that it hinders the conversation. I could have explained what kind of lie Shah told me, but instead I lied about Shah's lying!"

What is she? 9 years old?

"I sigh to myself and imagine what would happen if a clown were to mow us down in his van while rushing to a morning circus performance. Would he step out of the van to see our two bodies entwined? Would he climb on to our fatal embrace and start to ride us like a ball?"

Who cares?

These are just two selections, picked out by me flipping the pages, closing my eyes, then dropping a finger.

The entire book is like this. Start to finish. Childish thoughts piled on top of each other to build a Babel-esque tower of garbage that is so tall it irritates the underbelly of heaven.

In the end, here's what it's about: A writer who is paranoid, self-absorbed and really fucking boring, goes to lots of nightclubs and obsesses about bad boys. The end.

A good writer could have made something of it but Kanehara has made a fist of it. Her central character is a zero, and so is her book.

Give it a miss.

F.

Underbelly: The Gangland War

2008-06-17T03:04:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Rule and John Silverster

GET FUCKED! Not every book I read has to be highbrow la-de-fucking-da, does it? Go fuck yoursleves and suck a lemon, you who judge me. Up yours and sit on it cumrag. Pansy toff cunts!

(I was too embarrassed to buy it at Readings so I went across the road and bought it at that other store.)

As for a review, well, I mean, sweet Jesus, it is what it is. You know those concise articles Rule and Silvester write in the papers? Well, the book is just the same, but longer.

A re-print in about 20 years will be more interesting when they can actually print all the names. I got a bit confused with all the pseudonyms. I got confused anyway. There were 25 murders and none of them made any particular sense. The motives for the murders are as flimsy as a cardhouse, but I guess that's what makes them all the more compelling.

I went on a blind date last week. It didn't work out. I wanted a womb. She wanted a Trillionaire who looked like Johnny Depp. We got along okay though. Culturally we had nothing in common even though we were both skips from the 'burbs, but she was all Sex & The City and I was all Russian Ark. But anyway, we were at The Retreat in Sydney Rd and as we left, we peered down towards the Brunswick Club where Lewis Moran was shot. Our final chat was about the gangland killings. We had both watched the series on pirated DVD's and we chatted about 'em and I thought to myself, "This is such a bonding Melbourne thing." I reckon the gangland killings, like footy, is another of those great levellers that enables complete strangers to talk to one another. Carl Williams is a fucking celebrity whether we like it or not, and we're fascinated with him and his skank wife. I put it to you, behind this cloak of anonymity, that we're glad he's still alive; not because we are opposed to senseless death, but because there's a chance we can hear more about everything. The more they print, the more we'll buy The Age on Saturday, sit in a cafe and make sure everyone can see us reading the Book reviews and News Extra, but secretly we'll be busting to get home to read the GANGLAND 5 PAGE FULL COLOUR SPREAD EXCLUSIVE in the privacy of our own home where our comrades from the chattering classes can't see us. We're like fatties on diets, hiding in the toilet to eat a Mars Bar.

The Gangland Killings (TM) is interesting.

(I'm sure innocent patrons who happened to be drinking at The Brunswick Club will disagree with me).

But it's like what Jean Baudrillard said about 9/11. He made a bold statement... hell, it's more than bold. It's ugly. It's foul. It makes me squirm every time I think of it, and fuck, I don't even know if I wholly agree with it or whether there's any truth in it at all, but, I dunno, the line hits me somewhere that makes me feel very uncomfortable with myself. Here it is:

To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted it. If that's not taken into account, the event loses all its symbolic dimension...

- Jean Baudrillard

**

Look, on the one hand, Underbelly is the tale of very real people being very really slaughtered over drugs and cash, and the whole episode is abhorrent, and I'm thankful I had absolutely no connection to any of it.

On the other hand, when I read that Graham 'The Munster' Kinniburgh, when late to his own wedding, turned to his rather angry bride and said, "Sorry love, I had to see a bloke", I can't help but smile and think, "Heh. He had to 'see a bloke'"

They were a bunch of murderous thugs and utter cretins and I'm glad that they had the good manners to shoot each other instead of me.

But gee, they're kind of fun to read about. I give it a B Minus.

A Death In The Sanchez Family

2008-05-29T02:10:00.001-07:00

By Oscar Lewis

On the liner notes to Talking Heads' album Stop Making Sense there is a line which reads (from memory) "Rich people will spend lots of money to look at poor people."

Likewise, many authors have made a lot of money by writing about the poor. Pearl S. Buck, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, George Orwell (though in George's case, at least he had a shot at living amongst the poor for a while as recorded in Down And Out In Paris And London - an odd little book if ever there was one, for we knew all along that he, at any time, could get some cash).

I guess it's because we like reading about 'the unknown'. A guy I met once had a theory that the reason mafia films, prison films and gangster films all do well is because we, the audience, aren't in the mafia, a prison or a crime gang so we're fascinated to know what it's like. Same goes for the poors.

This book is interesting, without being entertaining or marvellous or anything. Oscar Lewis, who I've never heard of, travelled down to the slums in Mexico and just interviewed people about their daily lives. Slowly, a book took shape. He came across some siblings, two brothers and a sister who were faced with the death of their aunt and her subsequent wake and burial. The book is wholly in their words, and it's a real downer. They are so poor (they consider the sister the rich one because she eats breakfast sometimes and can afford to go on the bus).

There's Manuel, the eldest, who takes most of the responsibility for family matters. He sells trinkets on the streets, and can sometimes afford to buy juice. Then there's Roberto, the middle sibling, who is out of jail and is also a street vendor. He has children, but they were taken by his younger sister Consuelo who was worried about their welfare. He hasn't asked for them back as yet. Consuelo herself is an uppity go-getter and a show-off because she, unlike every other character mentioned in the book, is not an alcoholic and has a sewing machine. Most of them live in one room slums with up to 8 people. They sleep on straw, on the floor.

To raise the money to bury their dear Aunt (who they suspect was murdered by her abusive alcoholic boyfriend - not that the cops would bother investigating because she had cancer anyway), they are forced to beg, borrow and steal from people as poor as they.

Some of the comments they make are stunning, and some of the scenes heart-rendering.

Consuelo, arguing the point that Mexicans cope with death well, says: "There's nothing charming about death nor is it something we have become accustomed to because we celebrate fiestas for the dead or because we eat candy skulls or play with toy skeletons."

Ah, that line could be re-worked to apply to each and every culture and belief.

Manuel adds: "The living get the chicken, the dead get the hole."

The boyfriend who they think killed their aunt (who was 30 years her junior) allegedly "....was a son of a bitch who hit her and who wanted to fornicate with her in front of people even when she was sick with a cancerous fistula." Nonetheless, Consuela wants all her Aunts belongings to be left to him regardless, on the grounds that she never left the guy even when he hit her, so, he may as well inherit her things. It's another world.

The worst scene is the funeral. She's placed in the poor person's section and they actually dig up an old plot to bury her in. Manuel says, "I saw leg bones still inside stockings and a skull that seemed to be smiling sarcastically at the other body about to go in." Meanwhile, the Priest won't give a service unless he is paid 35 Pesos, an amount they manage to raise but at the expense of eating food for a few days.

Here's my problem. I'm immune to it all. I'm western imperialist scum, or something. I'm a chardonnay sipping socialist in my comfy armchair beside a pot-bellied stove reading this book with extreme detachment. "Bah," I think, "Zola did this shit much better."

Talking Heads were right. Rich people spend good money on looking at / reading about poor people. We read about them with the same detachment that we have to the mafia... "This is not about me, or anybody even like me."

The plight of these Mexicans has, unfortunately, only one effect - my mild entertainment, purchased for $5 in a second-hand bookstore, soon to be lost in the bowels of my bookshelf.

I give it a C.

The Handmaid's Tale

2008-05-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

By Margaret Atwood

I met a sound guy recently who had done sound for just about every major Australian rock band in the past 20 years or so. He was giving us all the backstage gossip and stuff, but generally, he wasn't one for back-stabbing or sneering. He enjoyed the company of rockstars and didn't really have anything too bad to say about any of 'em. The nearest he got was regarding silverchair. He had done a tour with them a few years ago and I asked what they were like to work with and he said, "Oh. Man, I'm just not on their trip."

I like that. He's not saying silverchair are bad people, or that they're wrong (something I would willingly say about silverchair), he just wasn't on their trip.

Likewise, I'm not on Margaret Atwood's trip. This is my second of hers (the other was Oryx and Crake) and in my dedication to the 'give each author three chances' rule I have one to go.

She's, umm, too wordy for me. Too descriptive. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just don't like it. Unless an author I like does it, in which case I love wordy and descriptive.

In The Handmaid's Tale, about nine things 'happen', seven of which aren't that interesting. But the book is 300 pages long which means that on average every 'happening' took 33 pages to describe.

Let's have a quick look at her writing style:

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloudcover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket. I wish I could see in the dark, better than I do.

Now personally, I think the paragraph would be better like this:

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon. I wish I could see in the dark.

There, I halved the paragraph but the essence and the poetry remain. In that wise, the book could have been 150 pages instead of 300, and maybe I would have liked it more.

Atwood seems to have the ability to write 20 pages straight in the manner of that paragraph above where nothing actually happens.

(Speaking of 'nothing happens', my favourite ever war poem is this one by Wilfred Owen. Take your time reading it. Read it out loud, if you can. It's a ripper.)

The thing about the nine things that 'happen' in The Handmaid's Tale is that the two most exciting things happen in the last two chapters (not including the completely unnecessary epilogue which lost her some marks). In fact, nothing at all happened until about page 160! Reminds me of Conrad's Lord Jim which was 400 pages of absolute garbage where nothing happens and 20 pages tacked on to the end as an afterthought (he was under pressure from his publisher), with some of the most exciting stuff you'll ever read - if you can make it that far. Which nobody can. If anyone says they've read all of Lord Jim they're a lying fucking bastard.

So anyway, what is The Handmaid's Tale about? It's set in a totally implausible future where extreme right Christians control America with a Taliban-like fundamentalism. The narrator is a handmaid, and her job is to have babies for her 'commander'. That's about it. The storyline is implausible, the narrator is long-winded and Atwood saved all the good bits until the end. I dunno, maybe there's some post-actual meaning to it all, or it's some comment on the (imagined)influence of the Christian Right in the USA, or it's some discursive feminist tome about 'women's bodies'. Or something. I dunno. I probably missed the point.

I'm not going to be too harsh with my marks though, because, just in case the point was obvious and I missed it, I don't want to appear dumb.

I give it a C Minus.

Pablo Neruda Absence and Presence

2008-05-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

I sat in the garden, spattered
by the great drops of winter,
and it seemed to me impossible
that beneath all that sadness,
that crumbled solitude,
the roots were still at work
with no one to encourage them.
Neruda

I was sooking recently to a friend about my inability to seduce Pony Girl from the Mallee Desert, even though I am quite sure we should get married tomorrow. The friend looked at me and asked, “Have you ever been truly in love?” and it was a loaded question. I knew what she was getting at. Pony Girl is a myth. Yeah, she seems perfect and all that, but in the absence of actually being her boyfriend / partner all I can do is be in love with the mythology of her, and so in the meantime, my friend was asking, of all my lovers and/or exes, have I ever truly been in love. I hate questions like that. I much prefer talking about footy (Go Tiges). Anyway, I was forced to concede that yes, indeed, I had been, and it was with a woman I often refer to as ‘that psychopathic ex of mine’, ‘whatzerface’, or ‘Andromeda 3.0’.

I was with Andromeda 3.0 for many years. We lived together, we owned property, we had two dogs and three cats, we were engaged, we were planning on having children and were approaching the wedding planning stage when I left her. I loved her to bits and would take a bullet for her. She loved me with equal ferocity. We were perfectly suited on a million different measurements and not only loved one another but revered one another.

I left her because she was a violent alcoholic.

She was riddled with mental illnesses (not her fault) which lead to many physical illnesses (not her fault) which rendered her anti-social, reclusive and unemployable (not her fault) and she became violent (her fault) and dependent upon alcohol (her fault).

I’m bringing this up because a) it’s my blog and I can say whatever the hell I want and b) this is relevant to the book review.

It has been two years since I left her, and she occasionally sends me text messages. They come in batches; whole series of them coming within the space of a couple of hours or so and she is clearly drunk when she sends them. They make no sense and are desperate and crazy. She’s sent me about 60 messages and I’ve sent three back. One said ‘stop contacting me’, another said, ‘stop fucking contacting me’ and the third was the wisest thing I’ve ever said – it was a response to a plea from her for us to meet again to which I replied, “the damage is done.”

The specifics of the ‘damage’ is neither here nor there, nor is the specifics of her illnesses and my decisions. What is relevant is that she loved me, and this was proven by the one message she sent me that came alone, that came when she was sober, and had nothing to do with our divorce. It said this: “You must read Pablo Neruda Absence and Presence”. That was it. That was all the message said.

So I bought it.

Then I read it.

It is exceptional.

It is a book made by a friend of Neruda’s, and it features excerpts from his poems, some essays about Neruda, and lots of photos of Neruda, Neruda’s house and his friends.

Neruda fans will love it, and even if you’ve never heard of Neruda and couldn’t give a flying fuck if he was in your pea-soup, you’d probably still love it.

But ay, there’s the rub.

You can’t read it.

This book, which I give an A+ to, is for me, not you. It is from Andromeda 3.0 to me. I want the whole world to burn every copy of this book that exists, except my copy. Because this book is mine.

Y’see, Pablo Neruda Absence and Presence was Andromeda 3.0’s very best way of apologising for the aforementioned ‘damage’, and after reading it, I then found the courage to admit to my friend that I once loved her. Of course, I told her I loved her when I was with her, often, and told other people all the time, but from the moment I left her, I never once said to anyone that I loved her - I refused to say the words - I was too busy calling her 'that psychopath' and refused, flatly refused to ever say I loved her because it was irrelevant.

This book means I can, now (though not to her, because that's not the point).

So, blog reader of mine, don’t read it.

It’s not for you.

This book exists solely for me.

Go read something else.

**

Exodus

2008-04-26T20:08:00.000-07:00

By Author(s) Unknown

KJV = King James Version of the Holy Bible, the only version anybody should read. The rest are shit.

PQT = Perseus Q Translation of the KJV

I went to a wedding yesterday and the Celebrant opened with, “We are gathered here today in the presence of God...” and I turned to a mate and said, “Run, God’s here! We’re in danger!” and he said, “What are you talking about?” and I said, “Well, I ate un-leavened bread with my roast lamb so he’s likely to put frogs into my kneading-troughs.” He stared at me like I was insane. “Trust me, I’ve read Exodus. And, I’ve been to Wendy Rule gigs and didn’t kill her. That’s also a crime in the eyes of God. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’.” He told me to be quiet, but a little later on we started going, “Meep! Meep! Meep!” which is the sound of the chocolate éclair truck backing back for the bride.

Because they all get fat after they get married.

**

It’s the story of a man, unaware of his noble parentage that is adopted out as a young baby and grows up to be an epic hero who liberates his people. If you thought of my namesake Perseus you’re right. If you thought of Luke Skywalker you’re also right. But Exodus is of course Part One of the story of a dim-witted murdering thug called Moses who, just because he was the direct descendant of the tent-dwelling liar Jacob, is chosen by God to lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and to their promised land.

Unless Richard Dawkins is your Dad you probably know the basics. The Pharaoh orders all male Hebrews born in Egypt to be killed because he’s worried there’s too many of them (Jew hatin’ goes back a long, long way). Young baby Moses is sent down the Nile in a casket and just happens to be found by the daughter of the Pharaoh and even though she knows it’s a dirty Hebrew child, she adopts young Moses and in a very convenient plot-development, she asks Moses’ mum to nurse and raise him.

One day, all grown up now, Moses sees an Egyptian hassling a Hebrew so he kills the Egyptian in cold blood and buries him in a shallow grave, then, like a common crim, runs off to hide in the desert. While hiding from the cops in the desert, God pays him a visit in the form of a burning bush and tells him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and to the promised land. With God’s help, he does this and of course there’s the classic scene where the pursuing Egyptians get drowned after Moses parts the Red Sea and also Moses gets given his Ten Commandments up on the mountain (but breaks them on the way down).

That’s pretty much it for Exodus, but, as I mentioned in my initial Genesis review, I’m going to read the Bible so you don’t have to. And so, for this review, I’m going to amass a series of ‘Things You May Not Know About Exodus’ , which are the things left out of the kids’ comic versions and summaries of Exodus most often published in regular media.

Things You May Not Know About Exodus

There’s a great line by God, and in the KJV it’s all in capital letters. God tells Moses he has to lead his people out of Egypt and Moses isn’t convinced. Like a spastic Kierkegaard, he’s asking, (PQT) “Who am I to lead the people, and who the Hell are you to ask me? Tell me what your name is so I can tell the Hebrews who sent me!” and God responds, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). On the one hand, arrogant cunt. On the other hand, he’s God, so it’s a good comeback. I’m going to use the line next time I can’t get into a nightclub. “Do you know who I am? I AM THAT I AM!”

**

It is one thing that God wants Moses to liberate the Israelites, but it is another thing for God to also want the Egyptian overlords to be punished so violently. If there’s any doubt that God is a psychopathic lunatic with the moral fibre of a cigarette butt, your doubt may be put to rest in Exodus. God, for some reason, decides to harden the Pharaoh’s heart so that when Moses tells him that he will lead his people away, the Pharaoh will say ‘no’. This then gives God perfect excuse to do the following:

“I will stretch out my hand, and smite Egypt with all my wonders...”(3:20),

“...the fish that is in the river shall die, and the river shall stink, and the Egyptians shall loathe to drink of the water...” (7:18),

“...their steams... their rivers... ponds... pools of water... (will) become blood, and (there will be) blood throughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood, and in vessels of stone.” (7:19),

“I will smite all thy borders with frogs. And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly which shall go up and come into thy house and into thy bedchamber...” (8:2-3),

“...lice throughout the land of Egypt” (8:16),

“...sever between the cattle of Israel and the cattle of Egypt and there shall nothing die of all that is the children’s of Israel...” (9:4),

“...dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast...” (9:9),

“...plagues upon thy heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people” (9:13),

“...smite thee and thy people with pestilence, and thou shalt be cut off from the Earth” (9:15),

“...hail in all the land of Egypt, upon man, and upon beast, and upon every herb of the field...” (9:22),

“...locusts into thy coast. And they shall cover the face of the Earth, that one cannot be able to see the Earth, and they shall eat the residue of that which is escaped...” (10: 4-5),

“...darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt.” (10:21)

And finally, just for good measure:

“...all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill, and all the firstborn of beasts. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.” (11: 5-6).

These are not idle threats. He did them ALL because HE IS THAT HE IS... a genocidal, bitter, corrupt maniac. We acknowledge that Saddam Hussein was a sadist who killed his own people, but God actually made these people that he tortures.

Ivan Milat is a more superior moral guide than The Lord.

It brings up much, and not just my dinner. All those zealots who claim every tsunami, earthquake, flood, fire and plague to be the work of God have, in a way, justification, for if you're a mentally ill religious fanatic who believes that the Bible is indeed the word of God, then, well, you would think the Boxing Day tsunami was God’s way of punishing Sri Lankans for whatever.

God, as presented here, is perfectly capable of this havoc if he doesn’t like your kind, and just like your common garden-variety psychopath, he’s easily provoked. In Exodus, at least seven times God emphasises that nobody should work on the Sabbath. He hammers the point home, repeatedly, to the point that I was yelling, “Alright, alright – shut the fuck up about the Sabbath”.

Point is: If you’re an uncircumcised Sabbath-day worker then watch out for frogs in your bedchamber.

But keep in mind, it isn’t just that he punished the Egyptians for making servants of his beloved Israelites, it’s that he deliberately hardened the heart of the Phaoraoh so that the Pharaoh would defy him and thus give him cause to destroy the country. This is akin to hypnotising someone into believing they are a chicken then killing them on the grounds that they thought they were a chicken.

God is not love. God is hate.

On to some more trivial fun stuff...

**

Moses is a self-confessed dumb-arse. “O my lord, I am not eloquent... I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue” (4:11), so God also recruits Moses’ brother Aaron as the ‘talker’. Aaron actually plays a very big part in the story as Moses’ 2IC, like Robin to Moses’ Batman.

**

Interestingly, God claims credit for making people the way they are, regardless of their physical and mental afflictions. He says, “Who hath made man’s mouths? Or who hath maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? Have not I the LORD?” (4:11).

You know what this means for anyone born with a disability. God made you that way. Remember that. He chose to make you that way.

**

For some reason, just before Moses goes into Egypt to confront the Pharaoh, God decides to kill him. In a pub. Yes, a pub. Moses is sitting there with his missus probably having a beer, getting ready for the big day, and God turns up and “..sought to kill him.” (4:24). Luckily, Moses’ missus quickly circumcises their son with a sharp stone and throws the bloody foreskin about and God lets him be.

No, I don’t get it.

**

After Moses parts the Red Sea and gets the Israelites through, he un-parts it as the pursuing Egyptians are coming through and they all die. We all know this bit, but what you may not know is that all it did was make the Israelites fear God... because of his violence, and fair enough. But, they decide to write a song about it and they all sing it, and it’s a real cheery song. Here's some of the poesy:

“I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously:
The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea...”
“Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power:
They right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.”
“Thou stretched out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them.
Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou has redeemed.”

...and here is a particularly poignant line in the song

“The people shall hear, and be afraid:
Sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.”

**

All the Israelites are in the desert, hungry. So God makes it rain bread.

**

There are many references to God being better than all the other Gods. Even God claims he’s better than the others – he admits he is a jealous God. Which infers... there’s other Gods.

**

If you hate God, God will hate you back for four generations. So even if your daughter becomes a nun, bad luck. If Mother Theresa’s great-grandfather was an atheist, God will hate her. He is very clear on this.

**

There’s the ten main commandments (the first draft of which Moses smashes in a hissy fit), but there’s many other laws God comes up with. Here’s a random selection. If you buy a Hebrew servant you have to let him go free after seven years. If you swear at your parents you will die. If you beat up your servant and he dies you will be punished, but if he’s just battered and bruised and can keep working then that’s okay because he is yours to beat up. You can sell your daughter to a good house. If an ox kills someone, you kill the ox and whoever owns the ox. If you dig a hole and an ox falls in it whoever dug the hole has to pay the ox owner compensation of more than the value of the ox. You can’t have sex with animals. Whoever sacrifices to another God, “...shall be utterly destroyed.” (22:20)

The only nice one is to not oppress strangers. That’s sweet.

**

It is Exodus that introduces us to the concept of, “...if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” (21:23-24)

**

God doesn’t particularly care about bridging the gap between the rich and the poor. When it comes to offerings, “The rich shall not give more and the poor shall not give less than half a shekel.” (30:15)

**

Just like in Genesis when Abraham haggles with God about how many Sodomites to kill, Moses also haggles with God about the proposed death-count of non-believers. At one stage, God decides he wants all the Israelites killed as well, because they’re annoying him, but Moses haggles him down. God may be bargained with, which backs up something my grandfather used to say: “I don’t believe in God, but if I’m wrong and I die and face Him, I’m going to have a few words to say to that bastard.” The Bible clearly shows us that you probably can have a few harsh words with ‘that bastard’.

**

There is an orgy scene. Moses goes up into the mountain for a bit of one on one nattering with God – for forty days - and a lot of those waiting down in the desert get restless and so they make their own God out of melted jewels and they dance around it naked. Moses finds out and with God’s blessing he has most of them killed. “Thus saith the Lord of God of Israel. “Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.” And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” (32:27-28)

**

Priests (or Rabbis, I suppose) are first invented / defined in Exodus.

**

Nick Cave has read Exodus. “...that they may make all that I have commanded thee: the tabernacle of the congregation, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy-seat that is thereupon...” (31: 6-7). So have the makers of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, “...a cloud covered the tent of the congregation and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle” (40:35-36)

**

Moses is 80 years old. At least they made Luke Skywalker young and virile.

**

Exodus is 40 chapters, but nine of them concern themselves with interior decoration, fashion design and architecture. They are the most boring chapters I have ever read of any book, and there’s nine of them. In fact, the whole book is ruined by these chapters. They should have just stopped at about Chapter 22, but no, I had to endure passages like this: (28: 4-8)

And these are the garments which they shall make; a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and a broidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle: and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto me in the priest's office. And they shall take gold, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen. And they shall make the ephod of gold, of blue, and of purple, of scarlet, and fine twined linen, with cunning work. It shall have the two shoulderpieces thereof joined at the two edges thereof; and so it shall be joined together. And the curious girdle of the ephod, which is upon it, shall be of the same, according to the work thereof; even of gold, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen.

It goes on like this for nine chapters. It’s a shame, because the next exciting instalment (Leviticus) promises to be just as violent as this one. We know the Israelites are going to rock up to their promised land and God promises he’ll inflict some carnage on to the people living there already. Can’t wait. Still, it would have been better if some canny editor 2,500 years ago deleted these chapters, or maybe included them as footnotes and combined Exodus with Leviticus.

**

Thoughts

As a stand-alone book, Exodus is a let down. It starts brilliantly – gore, bloodshed, war – and finishes with eleven chapters of design that Vogue Living would reject, word of God or not.

Still no Heaven or Hell. Just death when you die.

The line: “...darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt.” (10:21) creeps me out. It’s one of the most intensely evil lines I’ve read, and it comes from the mouth of our loving creator. It is, I guess, open to interpretation, but what I’m reading is that he will put Egypt into darkness both physically and emotionally. He is saying that he will creep everyone out, make them scared, jumpy, mentally ill perhaps, blind in sight and blind in reason. I find it a more violent punishment than the frogs, the locusts and even the killing of the first-borns. He is saying, “I will give them mental disease.” God is truly wicked.

His punishments far outweigh the crimes committed. It’s like Hiroshima. Yes, the Japanese were a threat, and we were at war, but the A-bombs dropped outweighed the circumstance. Maybe we could say the same of Dresden. Maybe. The Nazis were pretty fucked. Likewise, God’s treatment of the Egyptians for keeping the Hebrews in servitude (and mind you, there’s no mention of them being treated horribly) far exceeds the weight of their apparent crime. And why, why I ask, why would he do this to his own creation? In times of war, we can sort of understand carpet-bombing and annihilation, but senseless slaughter by the creator of the Universe? It defies logic. Why would anyone choose to be religious, even if it is proven that God exists? Why should we do anything this mongrel wants us to?

There are answers, for sure. We are his creation so we have to play by his rules whether they make sense or not. But, I am sure that we, as an enlightened people, should very easily get over this childlike subservience to a freakazoid that doesn’t even exist.

You know how to turn a religious person into an atheist?

Make ‘em read The Holy Bible.

**

I’d like to say one more thing: In another blog, under another name, I have written essays about anti-Semitism in Australia. It’s one of those things that shits me up the fucking wall, particularly because much of it comes from my alleged ‘comrades’ on the left-leaning end of the political spectrum. I cry Orwellian tears when fellows who I admire throw their support behind psychos like Hezbollah and Hamas and are forever going on about Israel-this and Israel-that and Jews-this and Jews-that. In their eagerness to label George W Bush ‘evil’ they inexplicably make their enemy’s enemy their friend. “Sunni insurgents hate the US so, umm, we support Sunni insurgents.” Yeah, you, Socialist Alliance. And you too, 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Never mind that these same insurgents are Jew-hating automatons with apocalyptic tendencies and are just middle-eastern half-witted knobs with deplorable attitudes to women, gays, children, Jews and democracy.

Exodus is a highly interesting document in the history of the Middle-Eastern conflict. Here we have the Jews, hated even back then, being told that they are the ‘chosen’ and being lead to their ‘promised land’ and the battle is still raging. As an atheist I can say, “This is land is not promised and therefore you can’t have it,” but as a humanist I say, “For fuck’s sake, please have it because no matter where you seem to go you are hated. Please, have this safe home we call Israel and every fanatic Muslim around them there parts... just fucking deal with it." And please don’t think this is an attack on Muslims either – I’m directing my attack solely at those Muslims who are apocalyptic and are calling for the total destruction of Israel. Unfortunately though, there’s a lot of them.

**

Exodus, despite getting off to a good start, is not nearly as interesting or as entertaining as Genesis. It is, however, marginally more evil. Although I recommend reading Genesis, I don't recommend reading Exodus, not because of the action, but rather, the lack of it once The Lord gets into his home renovation phase.

The Road

2008-04-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

By Cormac McCarthy

I watched that stupid horror movie The Ring late at night, in the dark, by myself. I was sitting there in my flanny PJ's going, “Oh this is stupid... that’s not scary!... Oh there’s more plot-holes here than in a cheese-grater” and when it finished I thought, “Well, that was dumb as.”

Then I got into bed. My heart was racing. I was petrified. I turned on all the lights and put on The Young Ones.

I had a similar reaction to The Road. It hit me a day later.

I read it in one sitting. I’d read 10 pages of it the week before, lost it, found it under my car seat and so started again after tea one night and with the help of coffee, cigarettes, bachelordom and the occasional stretch, I was done my midnight.

I slept like a log, worked the next day, then after tea the following night I saw it laying about and suddenly found myself reacting to everything I’d read the night before. I became glum! I was moved by the characters’ plight! I got the shakes for a few minutes (though I did have a cold and those Codrals, man, they rock).

It’s a harrowing book, and if you give yourself time and space to think it all out, it’s fucking nerve-wracking.

It’s a micro-cosmic version of Saramago’s Blindness or Camus’ The Plague, and it’s a novel version of Lord Byron’s terrific poem Darkness which I will link to here.

The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth and it’s about a man and his son, never named, who wander about trying to find food. That’s it. But that’s all McCarthy needs. He doesn’t go into boring explanations as to why the Earth is covered in ash which blocks out the sun and darkens the waterways, or why there are no animals or vegetation left. It just is that way, and the humans that are left wandering about are either cannibals or not cannibals. That’s the human division that remains.

There is the odd ‘flashback’ but he spares us the intricacies and instead serves us all the horror.

“... all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land... blackened looters who tunnelled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”

The planet is black and the dead are everywhere. It’s so bleak, like an Einsturzende Neubauten album. Everywhere they go is charred, desolate and freezing cold and it never lets up.

They come into a city: “The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk... The mummied dead everywhere. The fresh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth.”

The man tells the boy that they are ‘carrying the fire’ – of humanity, is the inference. They are not cannibals.

The man’s only motivation is the well-being of his son. “... he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”

History, names, art, science... none of it matters any more.

Speaking of Saramago, one of his lines also came to me while reading The Road: “...for in places of damnation we’re almost certain to find men and women with the animals that keep them company until the moment comes to slaughter them in order to live.” McCarthy takes this one step further, and one planet further.

What’s great about the book is that at every turn we find ourselves emotionally investing in the man and his son. We want them to find food. We want them to get away when they’re chased. We want them to be safe at night and to hide their camp-fires so none of those dirty cannibals can find them. Meanwhile, we can smell/see the landscape that McCarthy describes so we’re right in the thick of the action (the landscape itself is as strong a 'character' as the man and the boy are).

The world McCarthy has given us is exactly as Byron says in his poem: "All earth was but one thought--and that was death."

And to quote Saramago again, “...but, when all is said and done, whoever goes, goes, whoever remains, remains.”

It’s such a simple notion, but from it, writers, good writers, can launch tremendous works of art.

My review of No Country For Old Men was just, “Can’t wait for the movie”, and I have the same review to make of The Road. But maybe I cheapened No Country For Old Men. Two books in, maybe I’m just starting to work out this McCarthy fellow. I bought Blood Meridian so I’ll see how that goes.

There’s been a lot written of McCarthy in recent years, and my contribution is just to say that he’s a ‘very entertaining writer’. I'm sure Lord Byron would dig him. I’ll leave it to others more inquisitive and perceptive than I to examine his motivations and his subtexts and his contributions and relevance to literature. I’ll just enjoy his books, I reckon, wallow in his misery and recommend The Road to anyone and everyone.

I give it an A-.

God Is Not Great

2008-04-16T03:29:00.000-07:00

by Christopher Hitchens

I was reading an Attwood but I left it in a cafe. Alice with the beautiful eyes who ran the cafe tried to drop it in that night but I wasn’t home. Then she moved to Adelaide. But, she left it with a bloke called Phil who kept forgetting to bring it to me and in the end it took three weeks to finally get my hands back on it (from a German backpacker called Mika who took Phil’s room when he moved to Cairns). In the meantime I had started reading a Saramago but I went into Melbourne for a weekend and forgot to take it with me so in Melbourne I started reading The Road by McCarthy but then I lost that book (found it under the car seat a week later) and in the meantime had started reading this book which I now review. I try to do one thing at a time but I consistently do four things at a time and do them all terribly.

This is a terrific book but it was totally wasted on me because I’m already an atheist. It’s the religious that need to read it, not me. I spent most of the book saying, “Yeah, that’s right!” and, “You tell ‘em Hitchy!” But he was preaching to the converted...

It did make me reflect on my own atheism though. Hitchy was able to pin-point the moment he became an atheist. I can’t. I grew up on Greek mythology and Enid Blyton and looking back, even at a very young age, say, 7 or 8, I couldn’t differentiate between myth, fiction and religion. It was all just good yarns in my child’s mind. I still remember the bloke coming to teach us Religious Instruction at Generic High in the suburbs of Melbourne. He was kind, and told some terrific stories about Jesus and I was fascinated with the crucifixion but never at any point did I consider the resurrection, for example, to be fact. I enjoyed the story, period.

To this day I don’t understand why religion persists to exist. I want the stories to remain – Genesis alone is a ripper (see my earlier review) – but I want them filed in the ‘mythology’ sections of Readings. It’s what they are. As Hitchens says rather simply and powerfully, (paraphrasing)‘Philosophy has replaced religion, just as astronomy has replaced astrology’.

It is a very even book. It covers every possible argument against the notion that God is not great, and he presents his argument intelligently and patiently. The patience itself is commendable.

Hitchens also provided two fine anecdotes which help me to explain my own atheism.

The first concerns the astronomer Laplace (1749-1827) who made a working model of the solar system, known as an ortery. The Emperor studied the ortery and asked Laplace why God was not represented, to which Laplace replied, “It works well enough without God.”

I liked this anecdote because it sums up my life. I work fine without God, without the belief in God, without a belief in any omnipotent force whether that be a deity or the Gluten Gods* that the new-age wankers present to me, like ‘the cosmos’. My life is fine without belief in an after-life or a previous life, star-signs, judgement, colour-therapy, psychics, tarot, heaven, hell, priests, fate, destiny, creation and souls. I get my transcendental states out of great art, great rooting and great all-round living. I like life. I love it. God, if he existed, would muddy my experience, as would the thought that there may be a heaven. If there was a heaven I would kill myself to get there and if there was a hell awaiting me because I killed myself, even though I’ve lived on just about every measurable level a pious life, then religion is a sham.

Nope, this it it. This life, it’s all I’ve got. Just one shot at it. The resurrection is waking up in the morning and immortality is having babies (mental note: cut hole in condom next time I get a root).

But it’s not just that I don’t believe in God, it’s that I know he doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s why I’m at peace with my life.

Hitchens also brings up a thought that I have often brought up to lapsed-religious people. I can’t find it in the book (I should remember to put markers in) but paraphrasing: Do religious people actually believe? He conceded they may believe in their belief, but do they actually believe there is a God?

If pushed, if cornered, if forced to answer honestly, I reckon 99% would say ‘no’, and they they need to read this book. I give it a B.

*Gluten God, also known as 'I Can't Believe It's Not God!' I've had countless arguments with hippies and new-agers about their beliefs in star signs and fate - fate, in particular. "It was meant to happen," they say, and I accuse them of being Christians in disguise which angers them greatly because they don't identify with any religious movement, and yet all their new-age beliefs are religious. Just like their gluten-steaks, they have a Gluten God. I made that term up. You may use it.

The Kite Runner

2008-03-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

By Khaled Hosseini

See, I met a girl. She’s from the Mallee Desert and I fell hopelessly in love – I couldn’t control it. It seemed, and time will tell if I’m right (and time will tell if I am wrong) that I had never fallen so quickly or so vehemently over a chick in my whole life.

Here’s why I fell in love.

• She ordered us a gin and tonic each. When I went to take my first sip she reached over the table, grabbed the straw out of my glass, threw it to the ground and said, “You’re a man. I’m not letting you drink out of a straw.”

• As a young girl, living in the Mallee desert, she always wanted a pony. When she finally got one she hated its guts.

• She came to my house. I tried to dress down for once. I wanted to look less like a lapsing goth and more like a man, so I put on a hoody. She walked in and said, “How long have you been wearing hoodys for? Are you wearing that for me?”

• Great legs.

My love even spiralled, exponentially... oh I give up normally. You know those guys that when they set their sights on a woman they keep trying? I’m not one of them. But then I became one of them. Foreign territory. And in the haze of drugs and alcohol out with her one night she recommended this book.

I don’t do best-sellers.

But I was in love.

I bought it at Readings but also bought some highbrow DVD’s and Nick Cave’s latest album just so I came across as the artistic elitist non-hoody wearing lapsing Goth that I truly am.

“Oh yes,” I said to the Readings clerk, “I want a bag.”

I may have liked this book if it was true. But it’s not. It’s FICTION, and it is incredibly formulaic and convenient fiction. If there was a truly accurate word power rating machine it would give this book a rating of 12 – for 12 year olds. It’s written in baby-speak. The story is one cliché loaded upon another and fair dinkum, you could program a computer to write this book. I read its 340 pages in just a few hours (only three sittings) because it is, in literary terms, like a fucking Big Mac. It’s big but it goes down very quickly and you feel cheated afterwards.

There are about 15 twists in the book – though 'twist' may be too strong a word; 'plot development' is more apt – and every single fucking one of them is a cliché. Every character is a caricature. It is Days Of Our Lives: Kabul. The noblest character in the book is too noble to be real, and the evil character is just Darth Vader in a turban. The main character is a cry-baby sook, a bore, a non-sexual two-dimensional cliché-ridden nuff-nuff with as much beguilement as a kitchen tap.

The most insidious habit Hosseini employs is a reminisce of earlier chapters. It’s filler, like pickles in your Big Mac. It’s like he decided that he needed to ‘pad’ some sections out and so he did so by giving us a rundown of what we’ve already read (like what the 7pm ABC news does at about 7:15pm every night). Here, I’ll do the same to fill out this review.

“I sat down, lit a cigarette and sipped a water. I remembered reviewing a Colette book. I remembered strongly the time that I gave an Andre Morton book a rating of D Minus. I remembered when I called Hosseini, the writer of The Kite Runner, a nuff-nuff.”

Except he can drag these reminisces for about a page at a time.

This is what I have learnt from reading The Kite Runner:

1. That I was right to avoid best-sellers

2. That reading a book recommended to you by a woman you love is polite, nice and even a little flattering, but it is not seductive. To seduce a woman, you need to spend less time reading their books, and more time, you know, seducing them. Particularly ones that get given ponies and then hate them. It’s a metaphor. Though she recommended the book to me, she will begrudge me for reading it. I ain’t going to be sending this blog link to her, that’s for sure.

These are valuable lessons, and thanks to The Kite Runner I have learnt them. I give it a D.

3 New Reviews

2008-03-08T00:46:00.000-08:00

There was a cute chick in my local second-hand bookstore browsing the sci-fi section. To impress, I bought a handful of old paperbacks, including some sci-fi books – a genre that I have no interest in and have never bothered to explore. Was she impressed? I don’t know. I never saw her again.

The first old paperback I read was The Captive by Colette. I’ve read some of her Claudine series of books and they were all pretty cute and readable on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, this book was not from the Claudine series, and if it was the only book left in the world I’d kill myself. I felt great despair reading The Captive; not because it inspired in me a Morrissey-like aesthetic nihilism, but because it was shit.

Rene is a woman in her late 30’s and she’s single and wants a man. She is always miserable. She says, “It is raining harder than ever. I shall not leave my room again.” She lives in an upmarket hotel (she’s rich, but doesn’t work – she used to be a dancer). She lays about her apartment and listens to everyone else having fun. “They are odious, all those people behind the walls and above the ceiling, wallowing in repose like glutted barbarians, but... they are there.”

Rene eventually befriends her neighbour, a good looking young woman called May who drinks a lot and takes heaps of cocaine, all paid for by her rich and young boyfriend Jean. In the absence of a boyfriend or any friends at all, Rene starts hanging out with these crazy zany kids in their early 20’s. Then Jean, the rich young man, dumps May and starts having an affair with Rene.

He is more than ten years younger than her and she figures it won’t last but lo and behold, he actually loves her. This then leads to about 60 pages of over-analytical rubbish. Rene panics, she decides he is smothering her with love, she decides she doesn’t love him, but then she does, so she moves in with him, but then she decides to leave him, but then she doesn’t, and so he gets angry, so she decides to love him, but maybe she only loves the idea of him, he knows that, he is angered that she knows his thoughts, so he dumps her, so she snares him back, and then she dumps him, but then she doesn’t, and it goes like this on and on and on and it’s horrible.

What’s worse is that I know people like that. The whole “What do you think that means?” brigade of the world. There’s a limit to my tolerance of amateur psychologists, or the two-penny sleuths who vandalise my peace with inane conspiracies, fears and open-ended summaries of every gesture, sound and nuance in life. A spade is quite often a spade.

Don’t read this book. I paid $6.50 and it will keep me up at night. I give it an F.

Equally stupid but less offensive is Daybreak - 2250AD by Andre Morton (who’s a woman sci-fi writer of great renown allegedly). It cost me $4.50. It’s set in 2250, two-hundred years after a nuclear war and the world is populated by humans who live in mountains, some others that roam the plains and some others that live in valleys. They don’t like each other, but they have common enemies such as the Beast People who are mutated half-human/half rats that populate the old cities.

There are other mutants too but they are good mutants, such as the main character Fors (who has night vision) and his mutant tabby cat (the size of a tiger) and they explore this new world and make friends and battle enemies. Through the power of his kind deeds he unites the various human tribes against the Beast Things. The end. What is it with sci-fi novels set in the future and mutants? It’s always mutants. That’s why sci-fi bores me I think. Oh, and how come in the future everyone speaks like a retard?

“This is the small-small one of our hearthside, my brother. She is named Rosann of the Bright Eyes. Ha, small one, bid welcome my brother-“

I don’t recall in Year 10 Science anything about nuclear fallout deteriorating one’s linguistic skills. I give it a D-.

Two people whose book taste I respect have recommended The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I went into three bookstores and they didn’t have it, so I ended up buying No Country For Old Men by the same writer. I haven’t seen the film yet. I feel like I have though because the book was quite visual and dialogue heavy. It was almost like reading a film script. I enjoyed it. You know, it was okay. A page turner, but my life wasn’t changed. I recommend the book as one you can read over two or three nights in bed, as long as you’re cool with graphic violence. I give the book a C.

5 Reviews

2008-01-08T04:20:00.000-08:00

Well isn’t this value blogging? Five book reviews for the price of one.

I shall review the five books I have read in recent weeks in order from worst to best.

Countdown. Countdown. Countdown. Bdrdrdrdrdrdr... Count DOWN!

At Number 5, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen.

I have an old book of his short stories called Side Effects and it’s hilarious, and being that he hasn’t made a decent film since Crimes And Misdemeanours I was looking forward to this new collection of stories. It was a complete dud. It lacked all the humour and brilliant situations of his previous work and these were replaced with clever wordplays, amusing anecdotes and characters nobody could possibly identify with. I can get that sort of stuff out of Radio National for free if I want but this book set me back $24.95. There was one funny story near the end that echoed the magic realism of his previous short stories, but it came and went in under four pages.

I give it an E.

At number 4, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton.

I’m a big fan of this pompous baldy, but this was his first book and you can tell. It lacks purpose. Or rather, it lacks the result of its purpose, or something. I learnt a bit about Proust, but not much from Proust, which was the bit de Botton promised in the title. My life was not changed. I read the book, woke up the next day still single, still employed, all previous opinions on life and the universe wholly intact and the cat wanted her breakfast as normal. Somewhere, a fly buzzed. The only benefit I got from the book is that I can drop trivial facts about Proust at parties and sound learned.

Pity I don’t go to many parties.

I give it a D.

At number 3, After Dark by Haruki Murukami.

He’s the dude that wrote Kafka By The Shore which I really liked. This is his next novel, following on from that massive success. He should’ve quit while he was ahead. This book is as easy to read and as more-ish as Kafka, but lacks some essential ingredients... like, characters we admire, situations we’re interested in and a storyline. I suppose it’s an okay book, but next to his last novel it’s rubbish. Then again, I think the same of Abbey Road following on from The White Album.

It’s all set on the one night. There’s a young chick in a place that reminded me of Stalactites in Melbourne (24 hour restaurant, not McDonalds / fast food) who is joined by a young musician who she kinda knows. Meanwhile her sister is asleep, and has been for months. The sleeping sister is swallowed by her own TV. Then later on, a nerdy IT bloke punches up a Chinese prostitute and her pimps are angry. The young girl from the restaurant helps translate some Chinese to Japanese and then hangs out at the cheap motel where the hooker was bashed, chatting away with the landlady, a former weightlifter. Then she goes back to the restaurant and chats some more with the musician, then goes home and gives her sister a kiss (she has since been spat back out by her own TV). End of book.

The point? I dunno. Maybe it’s: A lot can happen in one night. Or maybe it’s: If we talk through our problems, many things can be solved. Or maybe it’s: Night brings out in us the kookiness, the genius, the sense of abstract we so rarely tap into during daylight.

Or maybe he was just under pressure to write another book.

I give it a C.

At number 2 is Shakespeare by Bill Bryson.

This is more a long essay than a book, but it cost me $29.99 so I’ll treat it like a book. Very, very interesting. It’s a clever idea. Rather than write a book, like so many others have done, filled with assumptions and guesses (even educated ones) about the life of Shakespeare, Bryson simply records facts. It is a book that details what is factual about the life of Shakespeare... as in, things we have proof of, records, statements and so on. What starts to sink in after about 10 pages is puzzlement as to why anybody would think somebody else wrote his plays. As Bryson himself puts it, “The only absence of contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them.” There’s an industry of thought that suggests someone else must have written his works but they have not one piece of evidence, or even a clue, or a hint (I nearly used the word ‘skerrick’ then... I hate that word. I also hate the word ‘horse’. Such a crass word for a noble creature. I suggest ‘Equinea’ or something. I digress). And yet, there’s plenty to connect Shakespeare to his works, you know, like records and evidence of him as being the author. Bryson concedes that after his death his works may have been edited, and that even in his lifetime, actors and producers and other writers may have changed lines and whole scenes even, and some plays may have been co-authored, but even this is loose conjecture. Shakespeare wrote the plays of Shakespeare. That’s just fact, and it was good to read a book that presented that fact so eloquently.

It’s a neat, tidy booklet that arms one against the whackos who love suggesting someone else wrote his plays. These are usually the same people that believe Jews run the world, we never landed on the moon and September 11 was planned by the Bush administration.

One other little curiosity he talks about is all the new words that Shakespeare came up with. Much has been written on this topic, but Bryson again concedes that they may not have been Shakespeare’s inventions as such – it’s just that his plays are the first to record many words that are now common in English. But one little gift he seems to have given the language of his own volition is the prefix un-. What was once, ‘Cannot be imagined’ could now become ‘unimaginable’. Add to that: Unknown, undress, undo... Undo – there’s a good one. “Undo your shoelaces” must have been something like, “Loosen and separate your shoelaces.” Apparently, he came with the suffix of un for reasons of rhyme and meter. I found that interesting.

I give it a B-.

Which brings us to Number One, and it is Number One by a country mile. Hell, more than a country mile. It’s number one by the length of the Nullarbor.

Essays by George Orwell.

I’ll mark it now. A++. Fucking fantastic.

His essays, roughly, fall under the following topics. Politics, English society, literature and art, history.

I think every person who can read should read these essays, but unless you take an interest in at least three of the above four topics then you won’t get anything out of it. You go back to The Da Vinci Code or your Steven King books.

There’s no point trying to discuss individual essays in review form – there’s 41 essays in the book (Penguin, 2000) and the topics are wide and varied and really, every single essay could be reviewed on its own merits. But what I can do is list the reasons why I so admire the bloke and loved this book.

1. He wrote beautifully. So clearly, so concisely. In one brilliant essay entitled Politics And The English Essay written in 1947 he talked a bit about how businesses, journalists, governments and so on deliberately foul up the language with a lot of gobbledygook – somewhat pre-empting the current obsession with mission statements, weasel words and empty phrasing – but he fell short of praising his own usage of the language. I’ll do that for him. He wrote superbly, sharply. Rather than taking either the post-modern or ‘high-art’ options of making simple things sound complex, ol’ Georgey did what great writers are meant to do – take complex things and simplify them using sharp and effective sentences. Hemingway could do it as well. So could Steinbeck and recently, Raymond Carver. The beauty of Orwell though is his...

2. Relevance. Steinbeck and Hemingway touched on politics, but George Orwell dived in head first. Reading his essays now, in 2008, I find that what he is saying is just as relevant now as it was when we wrote them. So often, when discussing attitudes amongst the left-wing and right-wing groups of England I thought to myself, “If I change one word here, or even one name then that sentence right there could go into any publication tomorrow.” Here’s one example: He speaks of the writer Chesterton and says, “...when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing that he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini.” I thought of all the anti-Bush protestors that are vehemently pro-democracy in Australia, but for some reason support extreme fascists like Hezbollah, Hamas and Sunni insurgents in their fight against the US. That’s one example. There’s thousands scattered through this book of essays. But it’s not all politics. Orwell is quite often very...

3. Funny. One of the first essays I was pointed to concerns Dali. Orwell says, “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other.” As a friend pointed out, we think the same of Shane Warne. Orwell wrote many essays about writers and artists and he obviously thought long and hard about what he had to say, but it’s obvious that he was having fun with these non-political essays. He let himself go, linguistically, and came out with outrageous statements, often controversial, but always playful. He even wrote one essay in defence of English cooking, and one other is devoted solely to the examination of how much time and money he’d invested in purchasing and reading books (with a note on the comparative ‘worth’ of the investment), and then providing tables and charts to compare these statistics with the time and money (and subsequent worth) he’d invested in cigarettes and beer. I wish I came up with that. He is also...

4. Brave. I don’t mean physically (though he did trot off voluntarily to the Spanish Civil War and fought), but artistically. He takes risks. 1984 and Animal Farm are the most obvious examples of this, but you can see that these two are not just freak occurrences at the end of his life. Right from the start he wrote bravely – writing about what he thought and believed, and challenging all accepted thoughts, and writing in a style that was very much his own. He took on the hard targets. Anyone can pick on Paris Hilton but who’s going to hold TS Eliot to account? Orwell. He’s not interested in soft targets or petty observations, or the minutiae of our existence (which all ‘serious’ movies and novels seem to be about these days – yeah I’m looking at you American Beauty). He didn’t care for the trifles that Good Weekend make a living out of capturing. He said, “Right, let’s look at anti-semitism.” He said, “I don’t think Dickens was that bright.” He said, “Let’s look at the way the English Language is dying.” He charges at big themes with guns blazing, lands heavily on grand platforms and shakes them, spends all day pondering not where his keys are but matters of global importance, and did all of this in a manner that I personally find quite often breath-taking. I’m a fan. Unashamedly a fan. Finally, he also manages to...

5. Make topics that I know nothing about seem very interesting. I never cared for toads, I've never read Swift's Gulliver's Travels or taken any interest in English cooking, but essays on these and other topics I know nothing about are still very readable and entertaining.

Whether you’ve read his novels or not, I recommend his book of essays. You’ll get something out of it. You can’t not.

In our English-speaking history, he is only below Shakespeare. He sits, for me, in equal second place alongside the likes of Hemingway and Lord Byron, and just above the likes of Carver, cummings, Hardy, Dickens, Lawson, Dickinson and Patrick White.

(If I include non-English writers, I might put Dostoyevksy, Zola, Mishima, Nabakov, Kazantzikas and Marquez in or around, or even above the same level. I’d have to think that out.)

To re-iterate. A++

Next up: EXODUS by (allegedly) Moses.

Genesis: 26 - 50

2007-11-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself. My copy of the bible is 2000 pages long, and I’m at page 30. It’s really small print.

Ah well, here goes.

It’s at least a 5 minute read, so maybe go make a cuppa first.

Note: ‘PQT’ is Perseus Q Translation of the Bible.

Chapter 26

There is a famine, and Isaac, being blessed of the Lord, gets a tip from the Lord on where to go for some decent water supplies. I ask myself, why didn’t God just send down some rain? Playing favourites again. Mongrel.

So Isaac takes his family (his wife Rebekah and his two kids, Esau the venison-eater and Jacob the tent-dwelling slacker) to Gerar.

Isaac does the old “she’s not my wife she’s my sister” trick, which he must have learnt from his father Abraham. This is the third time this ‘sting’ has been pulled in Genesis. So of course, everyone in Gerar tries to have sex with Rebekah and then they all get damned because they were trying to have sex with someone’s wife. Even though they were told it was his sister.

Oh fucking hell, I don’t get it. This book is hopeless.

Anyway, Isaac gets very rich, because everywhere he goes God gives him water so he can feed his cattle and grow his crops. This naturally pisses off all the locals who have to, you know, actually do some work, and struggle. This must be where Amway get the idea that if you are a good Christian then God can make you rich.

Chapter 27

When we left Chapter 25, Jacob was being a cunt to Esau. This continues. Isaac is old and dying and he asks Esau to bring him some venison with savoury topping. Esau is promised a blessing if he does this. But, Rebekah overhears the promise, so she runs to her favourite son, mummy’s boy Jacob, and says (PQT), “Quick, go get some goat, I’ll make it savoury, and the old bat will never know the difference. That way you’ll get the blessing because he’ll think you’re Esau!”

Jacob replies:

“Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man”

– Genesis 27: 11

Rebekah concocts a plan to put him in a hairy costume.

So Jacob goes and kills a goat, Rebekah turns it into a savoury dish, puts some fake hair on Jacob and sends him in to the dying Isaac. It’s like something out of The Three Stooges.

Isaac, blind, partially deaf, decayed taste buds that can’t taste the difference between goat and venison and with a terrible sense of touch, falls for the con. Jacob gets the blessing for all eternity, all the family riches and promises of everlasting greatness.

Poor Esau, who was still out gathering venison, gets nothing.

After Isaac finds out he was conned he’s a bit pissed off, but he at least promises Esau that

”...thy dwelling will be the fatness of the Earth, and the dew of the heaven above.”

- Genesis 27: 39

I would have preferred the everlasting greatness myself.

Esau plots to kill Jacob in revenge, so Jacob plots to clear out of town.

Chapter 28

Isaac, who is still not dead, says to Jacob (PQT), “Get the fuck out of here you cunt of a son. You have the blessing of all eternity by tricking me, so at least grant me this final wish: Don’t marry a Canaanite.”

You may recall Canaanites are the unlucky ones related to Ham, who accidentally saw Noah naked. These people are otherwise known to fundamentalist Baptists as ‘the blacks’.

Esau overhears, and still being a good son, goes and marries some chick called Mahalath, who is his cousin anyway. Incest? Yep, but at least she isn’t a filthy Canaanite.

Jacob goes wandering looking for a wife. He sleeps on the rocks. God comes to him in a dream and promises him, you know, fucking everything, including,

“...in thy seed shall all the families of the Earth be blessed”

- Genesis 28:14.

Jacob gets that promise from God because a) he is the one Isaac (accidentally) blessed, and b) God is a racist. But I ask: Why doesn’t God over-rule Jacob’s savoury meat deception? Because he’s a tyrant, is my answer.

Jacob promises to build a temple at the place God came to him in the dream, and give a tenth of everything he earns to God.

God takes commissions, you see.

Chapter 29

Brace yourself. Forget everything you’ve ever heard about the church and about ‘good Christians’ and the bible, and let me explain Chapter 29 of Genesis to you. I’ll put the whole thing in my words, but let me assure you, I’ll stick to the storyline like chewy on a thong.

Jacob goes looking for a wife. He comes across a chick called Rachel, who is his cousin, and pretty hot. They snog. He moves in with her family for a month and works for Rachel’s dad – his uncle. After a month the uncle says, (PQT) “Well, you’ve worked for me for a month and you haven’t asked for anything in return. Is there any payment you want?”

Jacob says, (PQT) “Yeah, I want to marry your daughter.”

The uncle says, (PQT) “Leah? Righto then.”

Jacob says, (PQT)“No, not Leah. She’s ugly. Rachel, the better looking one. The younger one.”

Although the Uncle would prefer to marry off the older, ugly one, he agrees to let Jacob marry Rachel, but they come to an agreement whereby Jacob will work for the Uncle for seven years without pay, and only after that will he marry Rachel.
Seven years pass. He finally gets to marry Rachel. A big wedding piss-up is organised. And at the moment that the marriage is about to take place, the Uncle does a switcheroo and hands over Leah, the ugly one.

Jacob says, (PQT) “Oi! Wrong one! I wanted the hot one.”

(PQT) “No deal,” says the uncle, “In these parts, the older one has to marry first. I tell you what though. If you marry the ugly one and fuck her, then you can fuck Rachel as well anyway, and then if you work for me for another seven years for no pay, you can marry Rachel.”

(PQT) “Righto,” says Jacob.

So he marries the ugly one, fucks her for a week, then works another seven years during which time he gets to fuck Rachel and finally marry her.

So now he’s got two wives. And they’re sisters. And both are his cousins.

The Bible: Incest porn, disguised.

Even though he hates Leah, it turns out he has to keep fucking her because she can have kids but Rachel is ‘barren’.

Leah has four kids to Jacob, but Rachel gets his love.

I know I’m jumping ahead, but I can now understand why God sent Jesus down to the world. He was probably up there thinking, “I’m not very good at this. Better send someone down to clean up the mess.”

A Seventh Day Adventist Pastor I recently came across explained away all the sexual misdemeanours by claiming that because the population of Earth was so small, shagging one's own family, maids and concubines was appropriate in those days. What he fails to acknowledge is that we evolved. You see, his argument only holds true if we assume Creation is a scientific fact. Which it isn’t. It’s a myth. A nice one, but a myth nonetheless. By 2000BC, the gene pool of the human species was wide and varied and there was no reason to fuck one’s cousins, maids and concubines other than for the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Chapter 30

Gold. Rachel gets pissed off because she can’t have babies, so she tells Jacob to fuck her maid and get her pregnant so she can have the baby. Just like Grandpa did with his maid.

Rachel’s exact words were,

“Give me children, or else I will die.”

- Genesis 30: 1.

The poor maid gets shagged, and has to hand the kid over. His name is Dan.

The surrogate mother thing works so well, it is repeated. The maid has a second child.

So now the kid score is: Rachel 2 (by surrogate), Leah 4 (by conception). Rachel must struggle with biology and mathematics, because she declares,

“With great wrestlings have I wrestled with my sister, and I have prevailed”

- Genesis 30: 8

Rachel may be the hot one, but she’s obviously the stupid one.

Then it just gets stupider, because Leah panics that Rachel is catching up on the amount of kids, so she gets Jacob to fuck her maid and have children.

Jacob must be having a ball. He gets to fuck the sisters, and their maids. Hot.

Typing one0handed.

And now here comes my favourite line of Genesis so far... Reuben, who is one of Leah’s kids goes out and collects some mandrakes. Rachel sees him and says, (PQT) “Hey, give me your mandrakes.” Leah finds out, and confronts Rachel.

“Is it a small matter that thou has taken my husband? And wouldst thou take away my son’s mandrakes as well?”

- Genesis 30: 15

The reply is pretty good. Rachel says (PQT), “Well, if I get the mandrakes, you can fuck Jacob tonight. Deal?”

The deal is made. Jacob comes home from work and Leah says, (PQT) “You have to fuck me tonight because Rachel got Reuben’s mandrakes”

(PQT) “Righto,” says Jacob. They fuck. She gets pregnant. Natural baby number 5 on the way for Leah.

But then, just like in the days of Abraham and Sarah, God takes pity on Rachel and fixes things so that she can have babies herself. God: The first gynaecologist.

She has a kid and calls him Joseph, later to be portrayed with much artistry by Jason Donovan on the West End in an Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical. Is there a sarcasm symbol I can use?

Jacob finally quits his job and takes his wives and kids away. As a departing gift, the Uncle lets Jacob take the ring-streaked goats and he gets to keep the spotted ones.

Jacob moves just down the road and starts his own house with,

“...much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses.”

- Genesis 30:43

Chapter 31

Trouble. Turns out Jacob’s cattle is healthier than his Uncle’s. The people talk. (PQT) “He took the good ones when he left,” they say, even though it’s only because he looks after them better. And besides, the Uncle has since become a cantankerous bastard and a thief.

God intervenes and tells Jacob to move far away.

He takes his wives etc. on camels and heads back to Canaan, where he grew up ‘dwelling in tents’.

But the Uncle finds out and decides to chase him. He catches up to the train at Mount Gilead.

He confronts Jacob and says, (PQT) “Oi! Why did you piss off with my daughters, all the maids, all your cattle? You cunt! I was a good uncle! / father in-law. And by the way, one of you stole all my images”. By ‘images’ I think he means family photos, except they were probably paintings because cameras weren’t invented yet.

Turns out he had a point. Rachel had stolen the pictures, but she hides them from her father.

But, they finally agree to part ways, and they build a little mound and agree to never cross it on the condition that Jacob is nice to the Uncle’s daughters. A happy ending for once.

Chapter 32

Jacob returns to his homeland but he’s shitting himself because his brother Esau is there. You may recall, Esau had vowed to kill Jacob for stealing his birthright and his blessing for all eternity.

He sends a messenger forward to tell Esau that he’s coming back.

The messenger comes back and says (PQT), “I saw Esau and told him you were on your way. He’s waiting for you, with 400 men.”

Jacob panics and asks God to protect him. Coward.

Jacob decides to buy off Esau’s anger, so sends him a gift of heaps of cattle.

Jacob goes to sleep, but in the middle of the night somebody starts a fight with him.

They punch the shit out of each other for hours, in the dark. After a few hours of argey-bargey, Jacob has to give up because his thigh comes out of its joint. Turns out it was God just coming down for a bit of Fight Club action.

How’s that, hey? You’re sound asleep in the middle of the night, someone attacks you in the dark, you’re forced into fisticuffs and wrestling and when the lights come up, turns out it’s the Creator of life and the universe punching the shit out of you.

God changes Jacob’s name to ‘Israel’ and forbids him and his descendants from eating the sinew from the hollow of a thigh (must be some kosher thing), in honour of their punch up in the dark.

Chapter 33

Jacob, after a night of ju-jitsu with God, gets up to discover Esau is bearing down upon him with 400 men. But it turns out he was just pleased to see him. The bribe of cattle worked. They reconcile their differences, and are loving brothers once again.

Chapter 34

One of Jacob and Leah’s daughters, Dinah, fucks a bloke called Sechem.

Let me pause a sec. This chapter is sick (not ‘sick’ as in ‘gnarly’, ‘sick’ as in ‘totally fucked’) so I did some research. Some claim that Dinah is abducted and raped by Sechem. In fact, it seems to be the accepted story, but here’s how the KJV has it:

Sechem

“...saw her, and lay with her, and defiled her. And his soul cleaved unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel...”

- Genesis 34: 2-3

I argue the accepted interpretation. There is no evidence that she was unwilling to fuck him. In other parts of the Bible, husbands ‘lay with’ wives and there’s no mention of impropriety.

So, as far as I’m concerned, Dinah has walked into town and got a root, like normal people.

Anyway, so Dinah fucks Sechem.

Everyone’s a bit agro about it because nobody in the family likes this Sechem fellow. Sechem wants to marry Dinah, and the two families agree that the marriage can only take place if all of Sechem’s family, and indeed, everybody from his home town go and get themselves circumcised.

So, Sechem and his father get circumcised, and organise for every male in the city to also be circumcised. So far so good, but three days later, two sons of Jacob (Simeon and Levi) go into the city and kill every man there... on the grounds that they had defiled their sister Dinah. They also steal all the babies from the city and imprison all the women.

Jacob’s not happy about his sons committing mass slaughter, and worries about people taking revenge. He tells his boys off, saying (PQT) “You idiots. Now all the Canaanites and Perizzites will come and kill us!” but the murderous boys’ opinion is unchanged, as they say,

“Should he deal with our sister as with a harlot?”

- Genesis 34: 31

The moral of this chapter is that if anybody has sex with your sister that you don’t like, go on a murderous rampage; kill the bloke, his father and every single man from his home town. But wait until they are circumcised. Oh, and don’t forget to steal the babies and imprison the women.

Chapter 35

God helps the family escape. God’s morality is at best questionable, at worst, absent.

Jacob (hereinafter sometimes also known as Israel) and his family build a temple, as instructed by God.

Rachel has another child (Benjamin) but she dies during childbirth.

One of the sons, Reuben, fuck’s Israel’s concubine. Israel listens to them fucking.

Isaac dies. I kind of forgot about him. I thought he died ages ago.

Chapter 36

Briefly to Esau, Jacob’s hairy brother that ate venison.

Esau has a few wives, and they all have kids. He’s wealthy, and he chooses to live a fair distance from his wealthy brother Jacob, just so there’s no competing.

Chapter 37

Joseph is Jacob’s favourite son. They all have favourites in this book. Anyway, Jacob makes him a coat of many colours, and Joseph likes it. Personally, I prefer single-colour coats, but nobody in the Bible is known for their fashion mien, except maybe Jezebel.

Because Joseph is the favoured son everyone else in the clan hates him. Especially when he tells them of a dream he had where he ruled over them all. His hubris makes them despise him even more. His dreams get even crazier and more megalomaniacal (I spelt that word correctly first time, in a rush, figuring spellchecker would work it out for me. It was a fluke.)

“Behold, I have dreamed a dream more: and behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me”

- Genesis 37:9.

His Dad, Jacob, pulls him aside and cautions him about his stupid dreams. But too late, all his siblings decide to split. They run away to a town called Dothan, but Joseph, who was ordered by Jacob to go and look for them and to be a bit more humble, traces them to this Dothan joint. The siblings see him coming and they say:

“’Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, “Some evil beast hath devoured him”: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

- Genesis 37: 19-20

One of the brothers, Reuben, comes up with the plan of merely throwing him into a pit but not killing him. Nice brother.

The others steal his multi-coloured coat, and throw him into a dry pit. They eat bread. Then they see some travelling merchants on their way to Egypt and decide to get Joseph out of the pit and sell him to the merchants. They get 20 pieces of silver for him. Not a bad price.

They all kill a goat, and dip Joseph’s coat in the blood. They take the bloodied coat to their Dad, Jacob, and he falls for the con, believing that his favourite son Joseph was killed by an evil beast. He mourns.

But little does he know, Joseph is really alive and well in Egypt, having being sold to an officer of the Pharoah.

Stay tuned for next week’s exciting instalment of Genesis, The Ancient Melodrama.

Chapter 38

Another of the sons of Jacob, Judah, fucks a chick called Shuah, a dirty Canaanite, and she has a son to him which they name Er. What a fucking awful name. “Hi, I’m Er.” They have some more sons. They all grow up.

But,

“...Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the eyes of the LORD, and the LORD slew him.”

- Genesis 38:7

Then the Lord says to Er’s brother Onan, (PQT) “I killed your brother Er because I didn’t like him. So you can fuck his wife Tamar, now.”

Onan fucks his dead brother’s wife, Tamar, but when he ejaculates he lets the spoof spill to the ground instead of inside her.

God didn’t like Onan letting the sperm fall, so he kills him.

Remember that boys: If instead of coming inside your lover, you come on the floor, God may slay you. Maybe if you come in her mouth it’ll be okay in the eyes of the Lord. I must ask a Rabbi.

Oh fuck. This is really a bizarre fucking book. I had to take a walk after reading Genesis 38: 1-11. Next time a Mormon or a JW comes a-knockin’ at your door and asks you about God and the Bible, say to them, “Yes, I am very interested in what you have to say. Tell me about Genesis 38.”

Judah says to Tamar, (PQT) “Ah, stay at my place and wait for the younger brother to be old enough to marry you. I’m worried God’s going to kill him as well.”

A few years later, Tamar goes wandering to look for Judah who is at work. She goes in disguise, dressed as a temple prostitute. She’s hot and horny, wanting to fuck Shelah, the younger brother, but Judah hasn’t approved of it yet. She finds Judah up in the hills. Judah sees her, thinks she’s a real harlot, and fucks her in return for some presents.

So now this Tamar chick has fucked Er the wicked, his brother Onan the sperm-dropper, and their father Judah, and plans to marry Shelah, the youngest son.

She falls pregnant to Judah.

Judah hears that his daughter-in-law has been dressing like a whore and is pregnant. He decides to burn her. But then, he discovers that it was he who had fucked her and got her up the duff. He lets her live because he realises he should have just given her to his young son Shelah in the first place, and that she was more noble than he was.

She has twins. A happy ending for Judah, who was the ring-leader in throwing Joseph into a pit and dipping his coat into goat’s blood, and then selling him to travelling merchants. What a terrific fella he was, even if he did marry a black woman, which is despised by the Lord.

Chapter 39

Back to Joseph, who is in the employ of an officer of the Pharaoh in Egypt, after he was sold-off by his own brothers and sisters.

The LORD likes Joseph.

Of course he does.

The officer likes him too, because he can see that Joseph is well-loved by God, and because of that, God looks after his house and the field. Win/win.

But guess who else likes Joseph? The officer’s wife. (PQT) “Fuck me,” she says. He says no, on the grounds that her husband, his boss, has been very kind. But she persists day after day, trying to get him into the sack. He still says no.

So she falsely accuses him of rape. Her husband puts him in jail.

In jail, the LORD makes it easy for him, and He gets all the prisoners to be Joseph’s servants.

Chapter 40

A butler and a baker who previously worked for the Pharaoh get chucked in jail. Joseph makes friends with them.

The butler has a strange dream involving grape vines and handing the Pharaoh a cup of wine. Joseph reckons the dream means he’ll get his job back. He asks the Butler to put in a good word with the Pharaoh if he he’s right.

The baker has a dream involving baskets of bread on his head that birds eat from,
and Joseph reckons it’s because the Pharaoh will have him beheaded.

Joseph was right on both accounts. But, the cunt of a butler forgets all about Joseph, never mentions him to the Pharaoh, and so Joseph languishes in jail.

Chapter 41

Two years pass. The Pharaoh has a weird dream about kine (cows, oxes). Then he has another dream about corn.

He asks all the wise men in the area, but nobody can interpret his weird dreams.
The butler says, (PQT), “Oh, there’s this Hebrew I met in jail that’s pretty good at this shit.”

The Pharaoh calls Joseph in. Joseph interprets the dream as meaning that there will be seven good years in the land, followed by seven years of famine, and so he should spend the next seven years stocking up on food.

The Pharaoh likes Joseph, and makes him a ruler of Egypt, to be outranked only by the Pharaoh himself. He even gives him some bling, and scores him a hot chick to marry.

Joseph travels Egypt, warning everyone to conserve their food in preparation for the famine. Sort of like an ancient-era Al Gore, or David Suzuki.

Seven years later, the famine hits, and everyone in Egypt is cool because they stored food. The rest of the world starves and comes to Egypt begging for food. Egyptians charge top dollar for the food, and thus become quite rich, all thanks to Joseph.

Chapter 42

So of course, back in Israel’s lands, they’re all starving, so Jacob says to his kids,

“...I have heard that there is corn in Egypt; get you down thither, and buy for us from thence, that we may live, and not die.”

- Genesis 42:2

Ah, it’s like a good old fashioned soap plot. They are going to get to Egypt to discover their brother, who they left for dead all those years ago, and who they tricked their own father into believing was dead, is in fact now a ruler of Egypt. And who says the Bible is just great tales? This plot is so believable! It has to be true, just like creation.

Sorry for my sarcasm. As an aside though, I can’t help but admire the Bible for its clever plot twists on the grounds that to this day these sorts of plot twists are used in movies and TV Shows, and yet, Genesis was written 2,600 years ago. Just goes to show how 'stories' are timeless. But really, Word of God my anus. It’s just bloody good yarns, so can’t we just appreciate them for what they are rather than trying to claim they are historical facts, or the word of an actual God?

So the sons of Israel go to Egypt to buy some corn. Joseph is the boss of the sales. They bow to him, not recognising him to be their brother. He recognised them though. He asks if they are spies (reminds me of Apocalypse Now, “Are you an assassin?”). They deny they are spies, they are just sons of a great man come to buy corn.

All sorts of weird bribes and riddles ensue, and it’s all a bit boring really.

Chapter 43

They have to go and buy more corn. More haggling and jejune riddles. Joseph still doesn’t reveal himself, but he cries a lot. He invites them to dinner. They all get drunk. Benjamin, the youngest, is a messy eater. Yes, that is mentioned.

Chapter 44

Joseph tricks them into letting him keep Benjamin as a servant. Judah begs him to change his mind, because old Jacob would simply die if he never saw Benjamin again. It was bad enough when Joseph went missing, but if his next favourite Benjamin went missing he’d surely die.

Chapter 45

(PQT) “Ha! I am Joseph! Yes, it was me all along! Bwahahahaha! Don’t feel bad about selling me to some dirty merchants after chucking me in a pit. Look how rich I’ve become! Must’ve been God’s master plan to make me rich and be able to look after you all in the time of famine. Say, why don’t you bring Dad and all the girls down here to Egypt. I’m fucking loaded, it’ll all be cool.”

Chapter 46

God tells Jacob that all will be cool if he packs up and heads to Egypt. All 66 members of the extended family move. Jacob and Joseph have a teary reunion, and Jacob indicates that he will die happy now.

Chapter 47

The Pharaoh welcomes all 66 of them and says it’s okay to spread their cattle about anywhere they want, in return for looking after the Pharaoh’s cattle as well. Deal made.

They get given all the best land.

Then Joseph turns into a capitalist cunt. Because everybody is starving and can’t afford to buy food, but the coffers of the Pharaoh are well-stocked, he buys all the cattle off the people, and their land. This then gives them money, which they use to buy food... from the Pharaoh. So now the Pharaoh owns the whole country, and is just as rich as he ever was. Joseph master-minded this piece of cuntery. But then, he turns a bit nice, and hands everybody seeds, and says, (PQT) “Here, have some seeds. Go plant them. You can keep four-fifths of the produce, and you can plant them anywhere you want on the Pharaoh’s land, but give a fifth to the Pharaoh. Now fuck off.”

Chapter 48

Jacob’s last blessing is to Joseph’s twin boys. He also gives the younger one a better blessing, even though Joseph reckons the older one, by rights, should get the best blessing. I guess that’s because Jacob himself was a younger twin and ended up getting all the good blessings. Cunt.

Chapter 49

Jacob’s dying words / blessings: (PQT) Reuben, you’re a cunt because you shagged my concubine. You’ll never amount to anything. Simeon and Levi (the two mass murderers) youse two can get fucked. Judah, you’re okay, so you can have white teeth. Zevelun, you can go live by the sea in peace. Issachar, you’re okay. Whatever. Dan, you can be some sort of crooked judge. Gad, you’ll die in war, but you’ll be the last to die, so that’s something I suppose. Asher, you can have heaps of food. Naphtali, you can be a good talker. Joseph, you’re the best by far and you get whatever you want because you’re fantastic. Benjamin, you’re my second favourite son, so you can be a good hunter.”

They then become the 12 tribes of Israel.

The daughters aren’t mentioned.

Chapter 50

Jacob is buried in Jordan.

Years later, Joseph dies and is buried in Egypt.

The End

Thoughts:

Still no mention of an after-life. Heaven is for God and the angels. We return to dust.

They are great stories, but blow me if I can work out how anyone can believe they are ‘fact’. Sure, many are obviously based on actual incidents, but their similarity to Greek mythology and Norse mythology and so on merely proves that they were the great stories going around at the time. There probably was a Hebrew called Joseph who did well in Egypt in the time of famine. There probably was a nephew of a great Hebrew who got his daughters pregnant. But the details, as presented here in Genesis, are legend... myth, yarn-spinning. How did it become ‘fact’ while the others became ‘myth’? It is no more or less believable than Dreamtime mythology, for instance.

The whole of Genesis, when you strip it away of its religiosity, is about sex and death. The whole book is a disguised tome of fucking and a record of man’s struggle with the idea of death. Freud had a point. So did Battaille. It is all that spurs me on in my life as well. Oh, I like my books, and I like to drink a cup of tea and warm my feet by the fire. I like wearing nice suits, and listening to music, but really, what spurs me on? Fear of death. Sex. Genesis is no different, and the writer of it (allegedly Moses, but in reality, some poet / journalist of the time) is just like me, you, and everyone else.

Next review will be Murakami’s latest, and I’m thinking of taking on Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ as well before moving on to Exodus.

Please leave a comment, even if it’s one word, just so I feel a bit more important than I actually am.

Waiting For Godalming

2007-10-10T05:51:00.000-07:00

Waiting for Godalming
By Robert Rankin

Corgi, 2001

There is no way on Earth I would ever consciously choose to read this book or any book like it. But, when a very attractive and intelligent woman, only minutes after giving some of the best oral sex a man will ever have in his life, says, “Will you read this book?” the correct answer is “Yes.” Because I’m a bogan. So I read it.

It belongs to a very very nerdy corner of the book world that I label ‘Comic fantasy’. It's a genre as alien to me as Nicaraguan Modern Jazz. Now, coming from a diet of miserable European 19th century realist novelists as I do, I tend to avoid any novel in the ‘comic’ or ‘fantasy’ section of a bookstore. This one is both, so it’s a double whammy, but like I said, the chick was hot.

Every single fucking line of the book was ‘funny’. As the very attractive and intelligent woman put it, “Like ‘Flying High’”. That’s not to say I laughed at every line. In fact, I only laughed at about five lines. The humour comes at a cracking pace, so much so that Rankin lets the storyline, complex as it is, degenerate to the point of irrelevancy.

This book is about the gags, not the story, though the story is quite loaded. It includes a ghost-seeing machine, the murder of God (who looks like Richard E. Grant), evil hairdressers, Devils on the Earth, God’s illegitimate children, insurance fraud, Jewish virgins, an ongoing satirical dig at cliché-driven spy thrillers and lots of London cabbie in-jokes.

It’s somewhere between ‘Flying High’ and ‘Carry On Heaven’.

Rankin has an audience. He must do, there’s heaps of his books available, and I can see why people like him. He’s harmless. He’s funny. He’s cute. He’s lighter than a feather, and you can read his book on a plane or in the never-never land of ‘almost asleep but I’ll just finish this chapter’.

The jokes slide over the reader with ease. Thinking is optional. For example:

Fangio seemed lost for words. ‘I’m lost for words,’ he said.

You got it? That’s the gag. And they’re everywhere.

Here’s another one that features heavily; the gag where Rankin gives an insight into his writing process.

But let us now return to Icarus Smith, who is about to have a little action. A great deal of action, as it happens.
But no.
Wait.
Let us not return to Icarus just yet. Let us instead return to Lazlo Woodbine...

“Hahahahahaha! Hilarious. The writer is inviting us into his process of structuring the narrative, but here’s his genius: He actually does know what he’s doing but he just pretends he doesn’t for the sake of the gag! Hahahahahahah!”

Whatever.

Sigh.

The best scenes were the ones involving the detective who referred to ‘dames’ and wore a trenchcoat. He insisted on his life being a cliché, even insisting that the book ends with a shootout on a rooftop. He made me smirk on occasion.

My biggest laugh was his description of his favourite pub; a ‘proper’ pub...

It served proper flat ale in proper dirty glasses. Had proper full ashtrays... There was proper unswept lino on the floor and proper unmopped vomit in the gents. There was a proper one man band called Johnny G who performed there on a Tuesday night. And proper drunken louts who threw proper light ale bottles at him when he did.

Well, maybe it’s not that funny after all. I did giggle a few times through the book, but really, I was mainly waiting for it to end. The last four chapters were shit.

The shame of it all is that the storyline, fractured as it was, could have been more gripping if he could have just toned down on the constant gags. Sometimes, situations are funny enough that they don’t need to be sullied by a cheap wordplay, or another joke that was the same as the four on the page before it.

Having said that, it would make for a funny movie. And that’s where a story like this belongs – on a screen. Not on a bookshelf.

All in all, it was okay. I suppose. Maybe a bit less than okay. It gave me something to do.

I give it a C Minus.

And now that I've just finished one absurdist comic fantasy, on to another absurdist comic fantasy... the second half of Genesis.

Genesis: 1-25

2007-09-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

The First Book of Moses, called Genesis
By author unknown.
(King James Version, Penguin Publication of 2006)

I’ve decided to read The Holy Bible so you don’t have to. I will review every chapter, start to finish, both old and new testaments. It may take years, and I’m only going to read each ‘book’ every second book I read.

In the case of Genesis, the first book, I had to stop after 25 chapters because it was doing my head in. So, this entry is only for the first 25 chapters. I’m going to read and review a normal novel next, then I’ll do the next 25 chapters of Genesis.

Chapter One

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-3

That’s the thing about the King James version: it’s written exquisitely. I have no idea why anybody would bother reading any other ‘modern’ version because bloody hell, they’re just shit. They leave out all the poetry and what remains is the rubble of poetry, cheapening the ‘message’, rendering it an un-inspiring cult.

In Chapter One, God creates everything in six days and then takes a day off, thus giving launch to the labour movement.

The fact He made the world in less than a week is considered by several million mentally ill people to be scientific fact. They even have a name for it: Genesis Science, which is taught as Intelligent Design. These people are morons, and have no appreciation of poetry, or, for that matter, the beauty of the universe.

Chapter Two

Garden of Eden, Adam made in God’s likeness, Adam names every animal (must’ve taken a while, and I’m sure he was getting desperate in the end: “What’s this one do?”, “It eats ants,” “I call it ant-eater”) Eve made from his rib while he was asleep... you know the story. The two of ‘em hang about, shamelessly naked, like most normal husbands and wives.

If the Genesis scientists believe God made everything in six days, they must also believe that Adam named the platypus, even if it ended up only being found on the other side of the world.

Chapter Three

Oops. Trouble in Eden. See, the serpent suggests eating from the forbidden tree, and Eve at first says no because God had forbidden it, and so the serpent says, “Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3: 4-5

At this stage, I was yelling out, “Eat it! Otherwise you’re just a sheep, hanging about in a garden, eating all day, achieving nothing.” And thankfully, she ate it, and that’s why I can write book reviews on the internet.

She then gives Adam some Forbidden Fruit, and interestingly, in the King James version, he willingly eats it (I’ve read other newer versions where it is suggested that she kind of convinced him to eat it, but in this translation, taken directly from Ancient Greek, Adam says, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” Genesis 3: 12).

God gets pissed off, and takes voice and legs away from the serpent. He then creates ‘emnity’ between man and woman, and tells the woman that all women will now have ‘sorrow’ when having children (read: pain) and says that husbands will ‘rule over’ wives. God: The first misogynist. And for every Christian who argues this with me I say: Read the fucking text. It’s what it says. You can’t go on about creation and homosexuality if you can’t also acknowledge these bits.

But here’s the bit I found most interesting in all of Genesis. God says, “...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”. Genesis 3: 19. In other words, when you die, you return to the ground. No mention of heaven, other than as a place God resides. No mention of being good and getting to heaven. God is clear: You come from dust, you will end up as dust.

If the Genesis Scientists believe that God created everything in six days, they must also believe snakes once talked and had legs.

Adam and Eve are evicted from the Garden of Eden, like streakers at a Test Match.

Chapter Four

Adam and Eve have two kids – Cain and Abel. Cain is a tiller, Abel a shepherd. They decide to make an offering to God. Cain offers some fruit. Abel offers meat. God prefers meat (so why are Adventists vegetarians?), and tells them so. God is clearly a cunt. Sometimes I get presents from two members of my family, but I don’t say, “Oh, I prefer this one to that one”. I thank them both, humbly. But I’m not God.

Cain sooks because God doesn’t like his gift. Then he kills Abel. Man, what a dysfunctional family. God’s first effort at Sims 6000BC sucks.

God is annoyed, so he tells Cain to go walkabout, you know, forever. Cain says, “But I’ll get killed!” (by who though? There’s only your mum and dad left, and surely you can outrun them). God puts a mark on him, so that he can recognise him (?) and to make sure nobody kills him, and if anyone does, they’ll cop revenge. This makes no sense, but fuck, neither do some of the plot twists in Romeo & Juliet, and that’s still a great yarn.

Cain goes to a place called ‘The land of Nod’ and marries someone, which, by logic, must be his sister. Cain, the first incest perpetrator. They have kids who have kids, and even Adam and Eve have another son called Seth. Lots of begetting.

If the Genesis Scientists believe that God created everything in six days, they must also believe the first family were victims/perpetrators of incest.

Chapter Five

Lots of begetting.

Chapter Six

God hates his Sims 6000BC game so much he decides to kill everyone in it except Noah, Noah’s family and some animals. God certainly doesn’t mince his words: (“And behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven, and everything that is in the earth shall die.” Genesis 6:17) I can’t help but hear an evil “Bwahahahaha” after that.

Chapter Seven

Noah, who is 600 years old just by the by, loads his ark up with his family, then two of every unclean animal and seven of every clean animal. Is a giraffe clean? What about dogs? They tend to eat poo, but they are kind of clean. So anyway, they all pile onto the ark (all 123,000 species of animal, presumably) and God drowns the Earth, and... (“all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.” Genesis 7:22)

God: The first genocidal maniac.

Chapter Eight

Noah and his ark companions wait a long time for the waters to subside. Must’ve been pretty boring in there, but at least there were lots of animals to play with, like tigers, lions, elephants and meerkats.

There are some truly beautiful lines in here though. Check this out: (“The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” Genesis 8:2)

The NLT version of the bible has it translated this way: The underground waters stopped flowing, and the torrential rains from the sky were stopped.

Chapter Nine

They come off the ark and God promises them that they can eat all the beasts in the world, though I wouldn’t like to eat tarantula myself, even if deep fried. Then the weirdest thing happens. Noah gets pissed and falls asleep naked. His son, Ham, accidentally sees Noah naked, runs to tell his brothers, and they cover him up without looking at him. Noah wakes up, discovers that Ham saw him naked, and curses him for eternity. This is the cunt that God saved? A wino who curses his own son for stumbling across him naked?

What is this thing, Christianity? Vacuous dribble about how Jesus loves us? Do these idiots like Guy Sebastian read Genesis? It says, “If your old man gets pissed and takes all his clothes off, and you accidentally see him naked, then you are cursed for eternity.” I’ve received better life-lessons from Fairfax bloggers, and they’re really fucked.

Chapter Ten

Noah’s kids spread around the globe, begetting.

Chapter Eleven

The people are spread, but God doesn’t like how they all speak the same language, so he gives them all different languages so that they can’t, umm, communicate with one another. For some reason. Shame though – in hindsight, I wish he just settled on Italian, and all of us could speak it.
The tower of Babel is worked on. More begetting.

Chapter Twelve

God likes Abram, and promises him some land (belonging to the Canaanites, descendants of naughty Ham, who made the mistake of seeing his father nude). Abram sets off with his wife, his nephew Lot and some other dudes. So anyhoo, they get there, build some temples, but then have to deal with a famine so they go to Egypt for a feed. Abram gets his wife to pretend that she’s actually his sister. He reckons if the Egyptians know that she’s his wife, they’ll kill her.

No, I don’t know why.

So the Pharaoh lets them stay at his joint, and he of course takes a fancy to Abram’s wife (thinking she was his sister), but because he took this fancy, God plagues him. But it wasn’t his fault! He didn’t know that she was Abram’s wife! Abram and God are cunts, and the Pharaoh was right to be pretty pissed off when he found out.

Chapter Thirteen

After completely fucking up the Pharaoh, they leave Egypt and head south. Abram and his nephew Lot are rich, somehow. So rich in fact, the lands were not enough to keep all their cattle, so they agree to split up. Lot goes to Jordan, near the town of Sodom and Abram goes back to the promised land, settling in Hebron.

Chapter Fourteen

War in the vicinity of Jordan. Lot gets looted. Abram finds out and leads an army to at least save Lot, and his extended family and people loyal to them. He brings them all back to his land. So the King of Sodom, who is the most mighty of the warlords, turns up at Abram’s joint and offers him riches in return for handing over Lot and his followers. Abram won’t bargain.

Chapter Fifteen

God promises to help Abram, because he’s a decent fellow. Abram is upset that he doesn’t have a child and heir. God says that Abram will have as many children as there are stars in the sky (about 80,000,000, right?), though his heir will come from his bowels.

No, I don’t get it.

God says Abram can have all the land he can see, all he has to do is kill some heifers, she-goats, rams, turtle-doves and pigeons. Fucking she-goats- who needs them anyway?

The plot twists in this book are all over the place, seriously.

Chapter Sixteen

So it turns out that the reason Abram doesn’t have kids is because his wife, Sarai, has bad plumbing. Easy fixed. Abram fucks the maid (at Sarai’s suggestion). Bible: the first maid-fantasy porn.

At first Sarai is cool with it, but after they fuck the maid gets pregnant and then gets all uppity around Sarai. Abram suggests to her that even though she’s pregnant, she’s still just a maid and that Sarai can do whatever she wants with her. So Sarai kicks her out. God finds the maid wandering about, pregnant, and tells her to get her arse back to the house and be submissive... you know, just shut up and have the fucking baby, woman. God’s misogyny back on display again, not to mention his class society leanings.

I say to the Genesis scientists: If you want Intelligent Design taught in schools because of what is written in Genesis, I demand you also teach that it’s okay for a husband to get the maid pregnant if his wife can’t conceive.

Chapter Seventeen

The maid has a baby – he’s called Ishmael. God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, and says that he will be the father of many great nations. Sarai’s name is changed to Sarah. God promises Abraham that he will have many children (to the maid?) but all the boys have to be circumcised. This is very, very important. Not only should the boys that Abraham fathers be circumcised, so should all the men that live in Abraham’s house, or work there. This sets off a circumcision orgy the likes of which De Sade and Battaille would envy. (“And Abraham took Ishmael his son, and all that were born in his house, and all that were bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the selfsame day.” Genesis: 17:23)

Even the slaves had to go through with it. I’m circumcised myself, but at least my parents had the decency to have it done when I was too young to remember.

Oh, God also gives Sarah the ability to bear children. Why didn’t he do that in the first place instead of getting Abraham to fuck the maid?

Chapter Eighteen

God and some mates (angels?) visit Abraham. He feeds them. They mention that Sarah will be able to have kids now, which makes Sarah laugh because she reckons she’s too old. God gets a bit antsy and says, (“Is anything too hard for the LORD?” Genesis 18:14). Show-off.

After supper, God mentions he was thinking of destroying Sodom because they are all naughty. Abraham reckons that if there’s some righteous people there, God shouldn’t destroy the city. They haggle about how many righteous people would need to be there in order to save it. God suggest fifty, but Abraham haggles him down to ten. God is a shithouse haggler. Don’t send God into a Thai market-stall to buy souvenirs.

Chapter Nineteen

This is terrific, this chapter. My personal favourite. God’s mates, the two angels, rock up in Sodom and visit Lot. Lot invites the angels in and offers to wash their feet. Fair enough. But then all the locals turn up at Lot’s house because they’ve heard about the angels and they want to have sex with them. Lot comes up with a cunning plan. To save the angels from being raped by the locals, he instead offers his two daughters to be raped. Fortunately, they were never raped because the angels blinded all the locals. But still, the offer was there.

The next morning, the angels tell Lot to get his wife and daughters ready to move out, because they are going to destroy Sodom. They flee towards the town of Zoar and are told not to look back at Sodom, but Lot’s wife couldn’t help but look back and so she was turned into a pillar of salt. This is interpreted in many different ways – the most popular being that she was punished for yearning to stay in Sodom rather than fleeing under the guidance of God. But who could blame her? Sodom was her home, after all, and she was probably getting some pretty good sex from the locals while Lot was at work.

So Lot and his two daughters hid in a cave for a while. The daughters, obviously worried that living in a cave will limit their ability to find decent husbands, decide to get their own Dad, Lot, drunk, and then have sex with him. They do this, and both have children. Feminists reckon that in reality, Lot probably raped them and then blamed them for getting him drunk. Personally, I just think that whoever wrote the story was either a cocaine addict or a pervert. Or both.

Chapter Twenty

Back to Abraham and Sarah, who hit the road to Gerar. They pull the same, “She’s my sister, not my wife” trick on poor Abimelech, King of Gerar. Abimelech fucks Sarah, then gets in trouble with God for fucking someone’s wife. But then... ready for the plot twist? Turns out Sarah IS in fact Abraham’s half-sister (as well as his wife). Wow. It’s like ‘Chinatown’, or the private letters of Lord Byron. Anyway, Abimelech gives heaps of money to Abraham and all is forgiven.

The moral of this chapter is, umm, I have no fucking idea.

Chapter Twenty-One

Sarah, who was once infertile, has a child called Isaac. But remember, Abraham already has a son (Ishmael) to the maid. But now that his wife Sarah has a child, suddenly Ishmael is not so important. After consulting with God, they kick the maid and Ishmael out of the house.
What a mind-fuck.

Just as the maid and the kid are about to die of starvation, God takes pity (for once) and promises that the kid will grow to be a great leader.

Abimelech the King of them parts makes a truce with Abraham, the most wealthy and influential person in them parts. Kind of like Hawke and Murdoch agreeing to be friends, for mutual benefit. Abraham bribes Abimelech with ewes, and in return, Abimelech builds Abraham a well. You scratch my back... The first recorded moment of local council bribery.

Chapter Twenty-Two

God is being a cunt again. He tells Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Abraham doesn’t have a problem with this, and just before he kills his son, God tells him it was all a joke / test.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Sarah dies. Abraham buys some land near Hebron to use as a burial ground for Sarah and anyone else related that dies.

Chapter Twenty-Four
Abraham, now getting old and ill, makes his servant promise that he won’t let Isaac ever marry a dirty Canaanite (the descendants of Ham, who saw Noah naked that time). In other words, keep the blood pure. Though, in hindsight, because they are all relatable back to Noah, the plan will fail anyway.

So the servant heads off to find a suitable wife for Isaac with some camels. Conspiring with God, he decides that whoever offers water to him and the camels must be a good woman and a worthy wife for Isaac. This woman is Rebekah (a second cousin to Isaac anyway) and aside from offering water, happens to be a sexy virgin. The servant then purchases Rebekah with lots of jewels. The servant and Rebekah’s family have a piss-up, then the next morning the servant and Rebekah head back to Gerar. She meets Isaac, and they get married immediately.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Abraham marries a chick called Keturah. They have lots of babies, plus he also has lots of babies with concubines, but Isaac is his favourite. He bequeaths everything he owns to Isaac, but only gives his other children ‘gifts’. Abraham lives to 175 before ‘giving up the ghost’ (interesting – I never knew that was a Biblical colloquialism). He is buried in Ephron, near his wife.

Isaac and Rebekah have twins. God, being a cunt, makes the pregnancy painful, and tells Rebekah that the firstborn will always be a servant of the second-born, even though they will both be leaders of nations. (“And the first came out red, all over like a hairy garment...” Genesis 25:25)

Esau was the firstborn and grows to be a good hunter. Jacob is the second-born twin, and he grows to be a dumb cunt who ‘dwells in tents’. Isaac prefers Esau because he ‘eats his venison’, but Rebekah prefers the lazy one... probably a mummy’s boy. What is it with these Biblical families preferring one kid over another?

Anyway, because Esau was born first, he was set to inherit the family fortune, but one day he falls ill and desperately needs some food and water, so he goes to his twin brother and pleads for some food and water, but Jacob refuses unless Esau ‘sells’ his birthright. Esau, desperate for some food and water, agrees. Jacob, who until this time had done nothing but ‘dwelt in tents’ like some ancient-era stoner, becomes the heir to the family fortune by being a total cunt.

Half-time summary

There is no mention of an afterlife. I find that interesting.

There is nothing in Genesis that is ‘moral’ by current standards. The lesson is: God created everything so you have to play by his rules, whether they make sense or not. That’s the only rule. If this involves pimping / selling your daughters, fucking your own daughters, killing people, bribing officials, being cursed for eternity for doing what comes natural, then, so be it. That’s the rules.

It is written beautifully. Not as well as Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, but beautiful nonetheless. If you take your time and read it out loud, it is wonderfully poetic and powerful.

Anyone who claims Genesis contains scientific facts is a retard.

Dead Europe

2007-08-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

Dead Europe by Christos Tsoilkas
2005

Synopsis:

Well, there’s two synopses (synopsi?). The book is kind of two books, although they come together like a yin-yang at the end.

One book is the story of Isaac, a struggling Australian photographer who is in Europe on some sort of arts grant thingo (I hate the term ‘arts grant’... I start thinking of ‘installations’ that make no sense, you know, some artist gets $100,000 to stick a red broom up their arse). Isaac starts in Athens, Greece, then visits the Greek village his family came from, then travels to other cities in Europe, ending up nearly dead in a hospital bed in London. Throughout his journey he longs for his de-facto partner Colin in Melbourne, but obviously not longingly enough to not cheat on poor Colin. Our very gay friend Isaac manages to have heaps and heaps of rugged, blood-and-gore sex on his journey.

Oh, there was one tender sex scene in London, but that was over in a flash. Oh, and once, having a bizarre attack of heterosexuality, he cunnilingus’d a Brazilian woman in a train because he could -- “... smell the velvet in her cunt” --- Page 256 – The ‘velvet’ to which he refers is her menstrual blood, which he wanted to drink. As she orgasms, he comes in his pants and then develops a kind of bloodlust for the rest of his journey. He may or may not have stayed with a ghost in France.

The other half of the book is the story of his maternal ancestry, starting with his great-grandparents in a remote village in Greece who end up as ‘refos’ in Melbourne.

The Cons:

This book is very gay, and by ‘gay’ I mean homosexual. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, other than the fact I am not homosexual, so every time there was a gay sex scene and loving descriptions of cocks and arses I kind of flinched. I imagine gay dudes suffer the same case of, “Whatever, let’s just get on with the story” every time they have to read erotic, sensual or even implied descriptions of heterosexual sex, which is probably 95% of all such material (guessing – I only have anecdotal evidence of this based on all TV shows and movies). Isaac likes it rough too. The more pain, the more messy the fluid spread, the more debauched, the more vulnerable his sex partner, the more fucked-up they are... the more he likes it.

Having heaps of gay sex is not BAD, as such. It doesn’t make it a bad book. It just means that someone like me, who has zero interest in and receives zero titillation from rough gay sex, gets occasionally sidetracked. And there’s a lot of it. Unlike watching a film with a gay sex scene, I can’t just go and put the kettle on. With a book, I come back with a cup of Liptons and the words, --- “Only his cock was exposed. He lay the boy on the podium, turned him onto his back, lifted the boy’s thin smooth legs over his own tuxedoed shoulders, and he entered him... a shower of semen arced, reflecting silver as it was touched by the candlelight”--- Page 225-226 are still there. I raise my cup of tea to my lips and think, "Hmm, must root a chick in the next month or so."

Every second chapter is the story of Isaac’s journey through Europe, and so every second chapter there’s guaranteed to be either rough gay sex (usually on drugs), vomit, piss, shit, pain, tears, sweat, violence and blood. Always blood.

Some of it was fascinating, most of it was gross. In the author's defence, it was meant to be.

The Pros:

Everything else. There are three aspects to the novel that I fucking loved, and had me gripped.

From start to finish, the discussion of Jews is paramount in both the story of Isaac’s journey and the story of his family.

There is a very direct Jewish plotline at one point, set back during WWII when Isaac’s grandparents, young newlyweds at the time, hide a teenage Jewish lad from the Nazis. They do this at the behest of the boy's father, who gives the young newlyweds all his treasures and money and is never seen again. Now, at the same time, the young newlyweds are having trouble conceiving a child, so Lucia, the beautiful young wife, fucks the poor Jewish teenager, gets pregnant, doesn’t tell her husband it's not his child, and instead, asks her husband to kill the Jew... ---“It is by protecting that bastard Hebrew that you are condemning your soul”--- Page 118.

It is one of the more powerful chapters/sequences of a novel I have read in quite some time. Indirectly, throughout the book, the discussion of ‘The Jews’ and anti-Semitism is discussed in great length and referenced in a multitude of ways.: The general anti-Semitism of your average European (something I noticed when I spent a couple of years there), the fact that Isaac’s boyfriend had a swastika tattoo and had once defaced a Jewish cemetery, the fact that a few Jewish characters appear and disappear, coy, gloating or otherwise of their Jewishness. It is indeed an astute observation Christos is making, one that is largely ignored, but I have been acutely aware of myself for many years: That anti-semitism DEFINES some people – hell, it defines some nations, and it envelopes people, and obsesses them, and they mythologise the Jews, even when they are trying to be impartial, and the whole Jewish thing is MASSIVE when studying the history of Europe and the current state of affairs in the world. It just ain’t discussed in that context. It’s swept under carpets. It’s denied, even. It deserves a whole book (and I’m sure many have been written) but Christos hammers it home from start to finish, from every different angle, from different voices, in different tongues, and he does it beautifully, powerfully and artistically.

The next pro is his description of the dying Europe, the Europe in decay, as seen through the eyes of an Aussie Greek. I’m a bit of a philhellene myself, and I lived in Athens for 18 months so I’m always eager to read anything about a Greek by a Greek. The fact he’s an Aussie Greek makes it even more familiar to me. His descriptions of Athens and the Greek villages were spot-on, and it was convincing enough for me to open my mind to anything he said about the rest of his journey through Europe. There’s a lot of referencing to Europe simply being ‘different’ to Australia. And it is. There’s something about Australia’s open-spaces and lack of architectural history that makes Europe an alien place. Not better or worse, just alien, and the ‘decay’ of Europe does do something to Australian minds. It decays us. We see a crumbling building, we crumble morally. I can’t explain it, but I got there and all I did was crumble (having a lot of fun in the process). In all of Isaac’s travels he meets exhausted, debauched, confused and angry people...and they seem normal, as if that’s all that Europe can offer. Isaac ends up decaying so far he winds up nearly dead in a London hospital – this is explained as being somewhat the result of a curse on his family, somewhat Isaac’s own bloodlust / delirium, Europe’s decay and perhaps just a good old virus. Or all four. It’s not clear, but hell, I didn’t want a medical explanation. Whatever the case, this is not a travel book – there’s no Eiffel Towers, Parthenons, wacky folk dancers or tours of the Vatican with a thermos and a sesame biscuit. It’s a Europe of prostitution, drugs, crumbling buildings, ancient blood fueds, racism, porn, bashings, beatings, poverty, casinos and pure beauty all rolled up into one experience – decay.

It reminded me of this painting:

The final pro is the whole back-story of his maternal ancestry. It starts like a fairy-tale: ---“High in the mountains , where the wind goes home to rest, lived Lucia, the most beautiful woman in all of Europe” --- Page 15. And it just gets better from there. It’s a tale of bickering superstitious Greeks, and who doesn’t like a tale of bickering superstitious Greeks? Kazantsikas is one of my favourite authors ever (Zorba The Greek and Christ Recrucified – my two favourites), and Tsoilkas’s tale is like one of his. It’s fucking fantastic, horribly violent at times, but fucking fantastic. There’s devils roaming, beautiful women, wars, infanticide... it’s got it all, and it’s a ripping yarn and I wish it was a book of itself, even though Tsoilkas quite nicely converges the two stories at the end.

All in all, a pretty good read, and the fact the author has to work part-time as a vet nurse is an indictment on the Australian literary community.

I give it a B-minus.

Testes 1,2

2007-06-22T02:10:00.001-07:00

Underwhelming blog, coming soon!