I meant to report what has sone on since I turned 65. Today was to be catch up day. Not going to happen.
I am tired, but I have been mostly tired these past few days.
The biggest accomplishment was to get a story rewritten.
I leave you with my notes from the past few days that I have been stockpiling in the draft of this post.
David Johansen, frontman of New York Dolls, dies aged 75
From Unforgiven to The Firm: Guardian writers pick their favourite Gene Hackman movies
Being a contrarian, I will nominate Bite the Bullet.
Gene Hackman: the star of every scene he was in
Forgiveness is beyond any moral or social obligation. It is an act given freely and gratuitously by those whose dignity has been desecrated. At the same time, forgiveness should not be reduced to merely a response to our sinfulness and corruption––for if we confine forgiveness to an act of redemption from sin, we will overlook its positive and creative value and miss what it reveals about the human condition. As Zizioulas notes, “There are, therefore, two aspects in Christology: one negative (redemption from the fallen state) and another positive (the fulfillment of man’s full communion with God; what the Greek Fathers have callered theosis). Only if the two are taken together can Christology reveal human destiny in its fullness.”[3] Forgiveness, as a creative act out of nothing, uniquely reflects both this origin and destiny: to be God’s image.
How JD Vance emerged as the chief saboteur of the transatlantic alliance
But on Friday, Vance finally got his fight. The US vice-president is quietly assembling a foreign policy team with a deeply skeptical view of Kyiv’s value as a future ally. And European officials have lined up to back Zelenskyy, saying that the Trump team’s performance in the Oval Office indicated that the US was truly siding with Vladimir Putin in the war.
The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat’
Garner is one of the most revered and beloved writers in Australia. She became famous from the moment she published her autobiographical first novel, Monkey Grip, about living with her daughter in commune-style houses in Melbourne in the 1970s. Subsequent novels, such as The Children’s Bach and The Spare Room, are slim, taut books, charting the interior dramas of family and friendship. Her nonfiction, written in the second half of her career, has mostly been reported from courtrooms: Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief are both accounts of long murder trials.
Garner has never followed a single course. Her most recent book is The Season, the story of her youngest grandson’s Aussie rules football team. It starts like this: “I pull up at the kerb. I love this park they train in. I must have walked the figure-of-eight round its ovals hundreds of times, at dawn, in winter and summer, to throw the ball for Dozer, our red heeler – but he’s buried now, in the back yard, under the crepe myrtle near the chook pen.” Garner has often said that her ambition was to write prose that doesn’t read like writing. She writes, instead, as if the reader were her friend and confidante, party to her most candid thoughts. Her great foe is pomposity. She can change register from elegiac to colloquial – death to a chook pen – in a single line. Her prose is hard-worked, thick with detail, but its effect is one of bracing immediacy. Both the source and purest example of this style is her diary, which she has written most days of her life. At her editor’s suggestion, the diaries were published in three parts in Australia between 2019 and 2021. She considers them her greatest work of all.
She sounds like a hoot.
Sunday
‘Heck, why don’t we just come up with a book?’: how Gene Hackman became an author
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser review – shame, desire and the ghost of Virginia Woolf: having seen much in the book press about this book, I decided to read the review. Here is what I am thinking about now:
This book starts as an evocative, shifting novel of time and place: a young man travelling in Switzerland, distracted by thoughts of a beautiful music teacher he met in London, recalls how, in his Australian childhood, he was evacuated to live with his grandparents at a sheep station in New South Wales in the second world war. There follows a brief story of how the boy that he was pocketed an emerald ring owned by his grandmother and chucked it away in the nearby woods. The shame did not end there. A young Aboriginal maid was blamed for the theft, and he did not have the courage to step in to save her from dismissal.
Just as you are losing yourself in this immersive little story, however, its author, Michelle de Kretser, steps in to inform you that “at this point, the novel I was writing stalled”. She goes on to explain how that writer’s block was a product of her difficulties with the “theory and practice” of her novel’s title: the gap between ideas about the novel – particularly those promoted by those French deconstructionists of the 1970s, and earlier by Virginia Woolf – and the impetus for storytelling.
The Sri Lankan-born Australian author’s solution is to stop the first story and tell another, perhaps related one, about an anguished love triangle among friends at Melbourne University in 1986. The second story reads like a confessional; if it is not autobiographical, De Kretser wants it to seem so. “Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a [fictional] form that allowed for formlessness and mess,” she writes. “It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.”
Yet, isn't the formlessness actually following a form? Why am I thinking of a river flowing as it will, leaving oxbows and loops as it cuts through the land? Moby Dick also comes to mind. I need to throw off this lethargy that has been dogging me, especially since my birthday. Playing on the river idea, I am caught in an eddy.
The Ottomans have always been interesting, probably because I know too little in detail and much in the broader perspective. The Guardian reviews The Golden Throne by Christopher de Bellaigue review – Suleyman returns
The song for my unfilled gap:
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