Mary Shelley

January, 2013: Andy brought home Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) because he knows I am a big fan of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of Vindication on the Rights of Woman (1792).  Poor Mary senior died a few days after giving birth to Mary junior.  A Cowra heatwave seemed an appropriate time to read a dark, snow-bound tale like Frankenstein.  

Shelley was only twenty-one when she wrote this; I have to remind myself to cut her some slack.  I was disappointed by the story-telling, which was very basic: first, there's the narrative told in letters from young Walton to his sister, then he begins to makes notes of a narrative as told him by a man his boat picked up in peculiar circumstances, and then this narrator (Frankenstein, who is not the monster but the scientist), passes the narrative baton over to the very well-spoken monster for a while, then the baton goes back to Frankenstein, and finally ends up where it began, with Walton.  Narrators are surprisingly difficult to manage; when they're retailing a story someone has told them, the question is: how much of the narrator's own story does the reader need to know, i.e. how interesting does the narrator need to be?  Too interesting, and the reader wants to know about the narrator's story, not the one he or she is narrating; not interesting enough, and we lose faith in the narrator's worthiness to guide us through the story.  Joseph Conrad is the master of narrators.  He makes his narrators mysterious, enigmatic, and occasionally opens them out as real, active characters at the end.

My main problem with Shelley's tale is that our main character, Frankenstein, remained pig-headed and unchanged from beginning to end.  What I wanted was - to use the modern parlance - for him to take responsibility for what he did.  This is what his monster wants as well.  But Frankenstein's emotional development goes from thirsting for knowledge, in the first few chapters, to regretting, for the rest of the book, this thirst for knowledge.  He takes the lid off the can of worms, then tries (in vain) to stuff the worms back in the tin.  It's not very interesting.  Much more interesting, and helpful, is seeing characters deal with unwanted knowledge, because that's what we all have to do.  Every time the monster pleads with Frankenstein to help him - seeing as he created him - Frankenstein ends with, "Begone, you daemon!"  I kept waiting for some sign that the author knew how annoyed I was getting with stupid old Frankenstein, but it never came.  I suppose we simply have to view Frankenstein's sorry end as the author's disapproval of what he did.  But some change of heart towards the end would have been a great climax.

I wanted Frankenstein to be kind to his monster, and introduce him to his family, and help him make friends and find a place in society.  That would have been interesting.  But Shelley set out to write a horror story, not a human-interest story.

Richard Neville

January, 2013: I was sitting at the dining table, scanning my sister's bookshelf, and my eyes kept coming back to Richard Neville's Hippie Hippie Shake (1995).  It seemed fitting, in fact, overdue, to read Richard's book, seeing as he, Julie and their daughters, Lucy and Angelica, lived in our house before we moved in.  It took Richard a while to shift all his Martin Sharp paintings; for a few colourful months, we lived among psychedelic swirls, faces of Luna Park and Tiny Tim, and a big pink penis entitled 'Don't Leave Me Standing Here All Alone'.  In the kitchen we had three more penises, these by David Hockney and belonging to Richard and the two other editors of Oz magazine.

I opened up Hippie Hippie Shake.  There's a reason why I hadn't read the book sooner: prejudice.  Even though it's unfair of me, I'm sick of Bob Dylan, and people who came of age in the Sixties.  I'm sick of hearing how they invented sex and music, and how Germaine Greer invented feminism.  I started to read The Female Eunuch several years ago, and by the first page, Greer was already pissing me off:

In the old days ladies were...anxious to allay the fears of conservatives, and in doing so the suffragettes betrayed their own cause and prepared the way for the failure of emancipation. Five years ago it seemed clear that emancipation had failed: the number of women in Parliament had settled at a low level; the number of professional women had stabilized as a tiny minority; the pattern of female employment had emerged as underpaid, menial and supportive. The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out. 

Greer thereby manages to dismiss 150 years of activism as a "failure", and snatch the laurels for herself and her generation.  Due to circumstances, not their extraordinary, natural-born attributes, Greer and her contemporaries were a big, powerful, confident generation that could afford to create their own history, and live in their own bubble without ever needing to leave it.  That generation is a nation, a superpower, still giving Bob Dylan's latest tuneless rambles five-star reviews.

So my position has been declared - I'm a member of a resentful, powerless minority-nation.  I expected Hippie Hippie Shake to be another a paeon to the glory days; the subtitle suggested as much, 'The dreams, the trips, the trials, the love-ins, the screw-ups...THE SIXTIES', as did the dedication, 'to everyone who was there'.  But as I began to read, my prejudices were overridden: it was simply interesting.  Neville looks back on his younger self without a desire to mythologise, or mock: he is trying to describe himself truthfully.  As I read further, I realised it was more than an effort to describe truthfully - he is looking for truths.  

I often think of authors as 'guides' through the book's material.  Neville, both older and younger, is a great guide.  As a young man at the heart of the London 'Underground', he provides us with the richest material you could ask for from that period - we go to Nepal with the first wave of backpackers, ride in Yoko and John's limo, go to the Wet Dreams Film Festival where Heathcote Williams heroically rescues a goose from having its head chopped off, a condom put on its neck and being shoved up a woman's vagina.  Young Neville is thoroughly immersed in his times, but unlike a lot of his contemporaries, stops short of getting lost.  He was a late-comer to acid and pot, which might have given him an edge; according to Louise Ferrier, he got a lot of air-time because he was one of the only spokesmen of the underground press who could finish a sentence.  Ambivalence must have always been a strong characteristic of Neville's; a certain duality must have enabled him to be a convert with long hair and embroidered velvet, a fervent believer - almost a martyr - but also a satirist.  The magazine Neville co-edited, Oz, seemed to be a magazine of ambivalence, with no fixed views except freedom-of-view, continually reinventing itself, dethroning its own pin-up boys, and even giving its Neville's own book, Playpower, a lukewarm review.

Balance in a memoir is usually achieved by the younger being immersed in the events of life, and the older looking back and doing the analysis, but Neville is self-critical even when young.  Moreover, Neville's friends and colleagues were critical of him, too.  Towards the end of Hippie Hippie Shake, the reader gets a long excerpt from what must have been a hurtful, humiliating letter from his best friend, Martin Sharp.  Another memoirist would have buried or burnt it:

Tomorrow you'll be claiming flower power as your own.  Don't get trapped in your fantasies.

If revolution is your calling rather than your posture - and as yet it has only been a pose - then you better pay more attention to how you got there, and why - your motives are questionable - the stirring up of predictable controversy in search of applause.

Don't squander your energy.  The coming court case offers you the most important chance to demonstrate your integrity in a public forum...Truth is the most revolutionary force of all.

...You are surrounded by flatterers.  I love you dearly so I write strong words.

My question turns out to be Neville's too - did that generation, with all their self-glorifying talk of revolution, actually change anything?  

It's almost laughable to read of their espoused anti-materialism, considering that as soon as they grew up and got their hands on some money, they became such a wealth-amassing, consumeristic generation - for example, Felix Dennis, former co-editor of Oz and now wealthier than Queen Elizabeth.  Or Robert Hughes, who, on accepting the job of art critic of Time magazine, told all his friends to go to his rented mansion in Hanover Square (London) and help themselves to whatever he couldn't take with him as he fled across the Atlantic.  "His Aussie mates turned into looters overnight - marble tiles, a water heater, velvet curtains, architraves, carpets, a chandelier...Hoppy, from IT, staggered out with the kitchen stove.  I was offered a brass showerhead.  As a farewell gesture, the mansion's walls were daubed with graffiti - RIPPED OFF BY THE PARK ROAD PIG FUCKERS."  This isn't revolutionary anti-materialism - this is selfish greed, and a very strong sense of entitlement.  

There's 'the rock revolution' - I read the introduction to Arnold Shaw's book of that name a couple of days ago.  Like Female Eunuch, Shaw seemed keen to write off any innovation from previous decades, in order to claim the 'revolution' for anyone who was under the age of thirty in 1969.  Looking back now, the development of music in over the twentieth-century reads like a fairly logical, explicable unfurling, with every 'innovation' - even the mighty Bob - having its roots deeply planted in the soil of what came before it.  New technology effected more 'revolutions' than did brilliant artists or great artistic ideas.  Electrical-engineer boffins, not lead-singers, are at the heart of rock revolutions.  In Hippie, Mick Farren issues a bulletin following a rather disillusioning Isle of Wight festival: "...the hungry freak realise[s] rock is becoming an opiate designed to turn him into a docile consumer."  Neville adds, "For once, as it turned out, Mick wasn't just Right On, he was right."

There's Women's Liberation - but women in Hippie Hippie Shake are typically short-skirted secretaries, or stuck at home with the kids, or on their hands and knees getting fucked with dildos (or headless geese) by performance artists.  No revolution of sexual equality in evidence.  It seems the only time women managed to get their voices heard above the rabble of men was when they were talking about women, or perhaps, sex.  At first Neville's gushings about the beauty of his quiet girlfriend Louise Ferrier got on my nerves, but after a while, this became relevant.  His portrayal of her seems a truthful reflection of the place women had in that world; valued for their beauty (a boost for their man's status), sexual accessibility, practicality (making coffee, cooking, doing housework etc.), and loyalty, rather than what they might have to say.  Except by Betty Neville, the author's mother: "Any women who entered my mother's house and failed to tongue-trip like Dorothy Parker on her fourth martini was suspected of suffering from brain damage."  The rise and fall of Oz magazine is the obvious narrative of Hippie, but it gradually became clear that the book is also a remorse-tinged examination of the rise and fall, strangely in sync with Oz, of his relationship with Ferrier.  At the end of Hippie, Ferrrier and Neville have drifted apart, with Ferrier becoming involved with some serious feminists, planning a 'gynarchic' magazine called Spare Rib.  Neville says, "Despite her steadfastness [during the Oz obscenity trial], I had not evolved into a deep, caring companion for Louise, or even much of a friend.  Oz, obscenity and me, me, me, took centre stage, crushing all else."

Finally there's all the talk about the sex revolution.  What exactly did all the rampant fucking achieve?  The 'sex revolution' annoys me because to me, it seems (I put in all those italics because, how can I know? I wasn't there!) to have been male-driven, and at the expense of the females whose bodies they required to execute their revolution.  Maybe I'm wrong - maybe women weren't as powerless as they, in retrospect, seem.  But with this, as with all of my questions, Neville is there, asking them, too.  Recounting how he and Ferrier were filmed having sex for a documentary, Neville says:

We were the cutting edge of the sex revolution, slashing away at the media, academia, everyday life.  This action proved something of vital importance, but for the life of me, I can't recall what it was.

But I can't dismiss the 'sex revolution'.  I've often thought that we live in 'the era of transparency'.  Not only are our offices open-plan, but our personal relationships are expected to be completely open and honest, too.  Lies between lovers are no longer considered 'being discreet'.  If you're gay, you're expected to come out.  We're all expected to come out, unashamedly, and be honest about our needs and desires (not just sexual), no matter how odd they are.  I think this is a great way for a society to be.  And all the fighting against hypocrisy and censorship that Neville's generation did certainly played a major part in how we are now.  In the Oz obscenity trial, George Melly, a social commentator and film critic takes the stand, questioned by prosecutor Argyle:

"Do you have any standards at all?"

"I think - publish everything, free people.  Surely the result is a freer and more beautiful person than someone who has to pass it around under a desk."

"If you really believe more openness is better, what do you think is wrong with an advertisement that describes oral sex attractively?"

"Nothing.  I don't think cunnilingus could do actual harm..."

At the end of the book, Neville's conclusion is modest and apt:

I think we helped free things up, even if some of us got tangled in our own delusions. Orgies in Amsterdam were never the key to the New Jerusalem, but it was an age of hedonism and, steeped in the sexism of the time, I took to it like a duck to water.

He also has a sweet concluding paragraph on marijuana, "Looking back, I am glad marijuana entered my life.  Overnight, I became stupider, but nicer."  He goes on to say, "Save the hooch for moments of celebration, I will tell my grandchildren, in the unlikely event they will be interested in my opinion.  Treat it as a homeopathic elixir and not as a crutch.  Opening the doors of perception is a prelude to one day closing the doors on drugs."  Neville has made me feel much more kindly disposed, even grateful, towards his generation.  Not for what they did for music, art, women's lib or politics, but for the openness.

Helen Garner

December, 2012:  At a Christmas gathering, a friend described meeting her long-time hero Helen Garner, and when I came home I found my eyes lighting upon The Children's Bach (1984).  I haven't read much of Helen Garner's work: Joe Cinque's Consolation, some short stories, and articles in journals.  I found Joe interesting - in fact, a 'page-turner' - but felt as though I had to crane my head around Helen Garner to see what was happening - she writes so much about herself and how she feels about the unfolding events.  Perhaps Garner considers it important regularly to remind readers that 'objective reportage' is a romantic fancy, and an impossibility.  Readers are not so stupid; we know that every writer is influenced by his or her individual slants, prejudices and partialities, but we have the capacity for filtering out the writer and picking out the truths.  And writers are capable of attempting objectivity, and getting close to it, if not achieving it.  Earlier this year, I met a man who was a personal friend of the woman made out, in Joe, to be a cold-blooded murderess; this man said Anu Singh was not guilty, and Garner's book was inaccurate and biased.  Garner's arguments in Joe were very convincing: if she got it wrong about Anu Singh, her book is a travesty in its own way.  I'm glad, as a writer of fiction, I don't have to take such risks.

So I picked up The Children's Bach, somewhat slanted and prejudiced against it.  If I find her reportage too personal, I find her fiction too cold and harsh.  I just don't think Garner and I will ever click.  I remember one short story I read, pulling off a book from my friend's impressive Australian-fiction shelf while babysitting: two friends are talking; one sighs, "I just want a man to look after me," the other says, "Women like us don't get men like that."  This comment both stung and enraged me, with its implication that independent feminist-type women (like me) disqualify themselves from supportive, loving relationships with manly men.  But perhaps it was true in Garner's generation - the women's independence might have been too fragile, too recently-won, to yield some of it back to love.

I found the reading of The Children's Bach to be on the unpleasant side.  My father complains that Patrick White is "too ugly".  I find Garner too ugly, even though her prose is elegant and clean.  It makes me think of the Picasso exhibition I saw some months ago, which showed his trajectory from beautiful to brutish and ugly; beauty was so easy for him, he seemed to despised it.  Beautiful prose is seductive and pleasant; Garner doesn't want her readers to relax, but squirm.  I was feeling a bit queasy as I read it, and when I think of it now, the queasiness returns.  I'll open three pages at random, to show you what I mean:

Arthur skipped around, squint-eyed with laughter.  The photos were of a naked baby boy lying on his back like a frog, flashing the enormous, raw genitals of the new-born.

At dawn Dexter stumbles in and stands looking at her.  She thinks, I can't be bothered fucking if it's going to be obscure.  But she does, they do, and the familiarity of his breathing by her ear brings up a rush of violence in her like vomiting...

The two mothers looked at her with their calm smiles.  She felt as jerky as a puppet.

'Last time I had my hair cut short back home,' Vicki chattered on, rushing to the round mirror in the corner, 'I looked so ugly that I cried all night.  And when I woke up in the morning my eyes were so swollen that I looked like a cane toad!'

Self-loathing seems to be a theme; the characters that aren't self-loathing are innocent, ignorant, lacking in self-awareness.  Is the Garner 'tree of knowledge' one that reveals you to be loathsome?  If you believe yourself to be lovable, that's only because you haven't bitten the apple yet.

However, taking a step back from the experience of reading it, I enjoyed and respected it for its structure.  The idea behind Children's Bach seems to be "let's take two family groups with different moral codes and send them colliding into each other."  I like it.  And the execution is very skillful - somehow the realism of the characters, what they do and how they talk, decoys the reader's eye away from this underlying idea; while I was reading it, I thought it was a vivid portrait of a culture; once I'd finished, I realised it was a scientific experiment.  A book such as Kate Grenville's The Secret River is too redolent of the author's intent for my liking - the author hangs over the stage, jerking the characters' strings and making them fulfill the author's requirements.  In Children's Bach, the author's intent is kept secret, until it's all over.  Then the reader can have a satisfying communion with the author, "Hm, very interesting!  I like the way the innocent, stable, loving family-group-#1 was blown apart by the worldly, individualistic, independent family-group-#2, and this resulted in both family groups being better off than when they started, despite the disastrous climax!"  My only gripe was the last two pages.  Writers feel they have to put on some sort of lyrical fireworks display for the ending, and despite Garner's stylishness, she also succumbed to this with a sort of arty wrap-up of the future:

and the clothes on the line will dry into stiff shapes which loosen when touched,

and someone will put the kettle on,

and from one day to the next Poppy will stop holding Philip's hand: he will drop his right hand to her left so she can take it, but nothing will happen, and when he looks down she will be standing there beside him, watching for a gap in the traffic, and she will not hold his hand any more, and she never will again,

and Dexter will sit on the edge of the bed to do up his sandals, and Athena will creep over to him and put her head on his knee, and he will take her head in his hands and stroke it with a firm touch,

And so on.  It's a daggy, unnecessary ending for a neat, ruthless novella.  In my reissue, I'd cut off the last two pages and end it with Athena sitting at the table, waiting for her family to come home.

Mikhail Bulgakov

September, 2012:  I find myself reluctant to begin reading a new book, as I have seven books read from July to now (November) that I haven't yet written about for my 'Book of the Moment'.  These books are: 

Vanity Fair (1847-8), William Makepeace Thackeray; 

A Country Doctor's Notebook (mid-1920s), Mikhail Bulgakov; 

Victoria (1898), Knut Hamsun; 

Anna Karenina (1873-7), Leo Tolstoy; 

Still Life With Woodpecker (1980), Tom Robbins; 

The Woodlanders (1887), Thomas Hardy;
Mrs Robinson's Disgrace (2012), Kate Summerscale.

Clearly, the trouble started with Vanity Fair.  It was such a wonderful novel, it deserved a long and detailed essay the like of which I hadn't written since high school.  But I had to postpone it, as I had left my dog-eared copy in Sydney, unable to justify lugging it back to Melbourne on the train.  So I began to read (for the second time) Anna Karenina.  A writer could spend her whole life studying this novel - it demanded an equally detailed essay as Vanity Fair.  Now I've just finished The Woodlanders.  Among these three monuments, I interspersed the other 'lesser' works; although they were good in their own ways, they're not so daunting.  I'll break the log-jam by starting with the first* of them, A Country Doctor's Notebook.

While looking myself up on the Google, I read an unfavourable reader's-review of my first novel, The Showgirl and the Brumby; the part I remember was, "lurid with every possible unpleasant smear of snot, sex, and mastication."  Fair call, I thought.  As truth is often found in the fine detail, I like writers who examine people closely - the workings  of their psyches, bodies, any part of them.  This is why I like doctor-writers.  They don't shy away from things like eyeballs covered with a sac of pus, or head-ectomies on babies stuck in birth canals.  They find it all interesting.  A Country Doctor's Notebook is a collection of accounts of cases that came to Bulgakov while he was an inexperienced doctor at an outpost in the wilds of Russia.  Although each story is discrete in itself, and presumably published separately along the way, as a collection they plot the course of a young man growing to fit the responsibilities he has (somewhat prematurely) taken on.  The phrase "you have to start somewhere" takes on a different shade when you're talking about amputations.  As he faces the leg he has to cut off, Bulgakov seems almost as ignorant and unconfident as I would be if I had to do it.

It makes me think about twenty-year-olds in our time; older people consider them spoilt, lazy, like overgrown children.  The cure is to give them responsibility and leave them to their own devices, but the oldies seem reluctant to do this, either because they want to hold onto the responsibility (and power) themselves, or else because they enjoy fussing over their big babies.

The collection ends with the diary (fictional?) of a young doctor who had preceded Bulgakov as the local doctor in this huge, snowbound wilderness.  He found relief in morphine from loneliness, and the stress of being solely responsible for his patients' lives; he rapidly became addicted, tried to wean himself off it by taking cocaine, and finally killed himself.  His parting advice, having used himself as a test-case, was: don't try to cure a morphine addiction with cocaine.  This might be another lesson for our youngies in Bulgakov's book.

*Alas, the remaining six are as yet still unblogged.

William Wordsworth

August, 2012: I always found poetry hard to read.  Where does one read it - in bed or over breakfast?  How does one read it - one at a time, followed by ten minutes of reflection?  Despite coming from a poetry-writing and -loving family, I struggled to find a place for it in my life.  I thought, "Oh, well, songs are my poetry."  Last year, my father (Geoffrey Lehmann) and his old friend, Robert Gray, published an anthology, Australian Poetry Since 1788.  It got me reading poetry.  I haven't written a post about it yet - as it's about the size of a house-brick, it doesn't come with me on my rambles, so I'm only two centimetres through it.  But it makes reading poetry pleasurable; the poems have been carefully selected, and Geoff and Bob's introductions guide the reader surely through the material.  For me, it has set a standard for reading poetry: if I'm not enjoying myself, then it's highly likely the poem is a dud.  Here's an enjoyable poem written by Jamie Grant about the anthology*:

http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/grant-jamie/speech-for-the-launching-of-australian-poetry-in-the-twentieth-century-by-robert-gray-and-geoffrey-lehmann-0049020/

So first there was Geoff and Bob's anthology.  Then there were the Philip Larkin poems Bob Ellis read aloud from his lap-top - they were so good, I carried around a volume called Witsun Weddings until I lost it.  Then there was the Wordsworth line Thomas Hardy quoted in Return Of The Native, "plain living and high thinking," that provoked me into seeking out the whole poem.  With William Wordsworth, my conversion to poetry was complete.  

For the rambler, a slim volume or two of poetry slipped into the backpack equates to incalculable hours of pleasure and enrichment, at a mere 50g of additional weight.  I took a Wordsworth best-of (selected by Stephen Logan from poems 1796-1845) off my grandfather's shelf, and have been carrying it around all year.  Wordsworth doesn't have a broad range.  He writes about love of the natural world, as opposed to the man-made world or "what man has made of man."  This just happens to be the theme closest to my heart - it's practically my religion.  I've never read anyone express the effect of nature on the soul as well as he does, and I don't care if it's the only thing he can write about.  His short poems written from (apparently) his point of view are my favourites.  They are pure, clear bursts of inspiration.  The poem quoted by Hardy, 'Written in London, September 1802', is only fourteen lines; here are a few of them:

The wealthiest man among us is the best:

No grandeur now in nature or in book

Delights us.  Rapine, avarice, expence,

This is idolatry; and these we adore:

Plain living and high thinking are no more:

The homely beauty of the good old cause

Is gone;

He gets a bit murky and muddled when he writes longer poems (though I like his long story-poems, or ballads).  I waded through the 206 lines of 'Ode' (1807), which, as far as I could gather, reiterates with each verse that the poet has become blinded to nature's beauty by a malaise, springing from his humanness.  There are beautiful lines, such as the last two, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears", but the structure is weak - it has the simple, gem-like conclusion, but too few ideas leading up to it.  

Wordsworth is most successful when he has a narrative to hang his ideas on; often the narrative is as basic as "I went out walking and had an encounter that provoked an interesting thought," such as in 'Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman' (1798).  He describes an old man - and manages to slip in a few points about the transience of youth and vigour - whom the poet sees one summer day trying to grub up a rotten old tree stump.  Here are the last two verses (out of thirteen):

'You're overtasked, good Simon Lee,

Give me your tool' to him I said;

And at the word right gladly he

Received my proffer'd aid.

I struck and with a single blow

The tangled root I sever'd,

At which the poor old man so long

And vainly had endeavour'd.

The tears into his eyes were brought, 

And thanks and praises seemed to run

So fast out of his heart, I thought

They never would have done.

-I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning.

Alas! the gratitude of men

Has oftner left me mourning.

This unexpected conclusion brought tears to my eyes; despite Wordsworth's own misgivings about it - "My gentle reader, I perceive/ How patiently you've waited,/ And I'm afraid that you expect/ Some tale will be related" - 'Simon Lee' is a much more satisfying poem than the loftier 'Ode'.

I spend quite a bit of time lying in long grass looking up at the sky, and if anyone should ever charge me with being lazy or sluggish, there is a good retort in 'Expostulation and Reply' (1798):

'The eye it cannot chuse but see,

'We cannot bid the ear be still;

'Our bodies feel, where'er they be,

'Against, or with our will.

'Nor less I deem that there are powers,

'Which of themselves our minds impress,

'That we can feed this mind of ours,

'In a wise passiveness.

'Think you, mid all this mighty sum

'Of things forever speaking,

'That nothing of itself will come,

'But we must still be seeking?

'-Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,

'Conversing as I may,

'I sit upon this old grey stone,

'And dream my time away.'

In 'Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey' (1798), he revisits a landscape he knows and loves.  He speaks about these "forms of beauty":

Oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart...

...Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world

Is lighten'd: - that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, 

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

For me, this perfectly describes the effect that nature - all that time I've spent looking up at the sky and stroking gum trees - has on me.

The other lines quoted in my small circle are:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

And also:

My former thoughts return'd: the fear that kills;

And hope that is unwilling to be fed

The phrase 'Wordsworth's daffodils' is a shorthand for the solace that is to be found in nature:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing Daffodils;

I can understand Wordsworth in terms of songwriters: he's no Cole Porter or Dolly Parton - versatile writers constantly exploring different emotions, characters, themes and scenario.  He's more in the style of Stevie Nicks, capable only of one perspective (their own), but now and then producing a piece of work in which the intense subjectivity is pushed all the way through into universality, becoming the final word on that particular subject.

*erratum: Grant's poem was about a previous Geoff and Bob anthology.  It's still a good poem.

Shakespeare - Romeo And Juliet

June, 2012: I caught the train from Sydney to Melbourne, and to vary my diet of Vanity Fair, I decided the slender volume of Romeo And Juliet (1597) would be worth squeezing into my pack.  I haven't read a lot of Shakespeare, just as I don't own a Beatles album.  I know the work is good without even looking into it; moreover, I know the work - picking it up on the ether - without even reading it.  But this is lazy and ignorant.  Shakespeare is really easy to read - it took only a few days to read Romeo And Juliet - so there are no excuses to pass him over.  

What did I discover?  He's good.  He tells his story in brisk, powerful strokes.  The only time the plot isn't being advanced is when he'll have a few characters standing around making ribald jokes; then the reader doesn't resent the slowing down, because it's funny and sexy.  And despite the minimal characterisation, and the somewhat rushed pace, he manages to throw in enough human-content to make you feel sad when a character dies.  Other surprises: I didn't realise that Romeo starts the play in love with Rosaline, and I like the depiction of a hungry-for-love young man.  Also, I liked Juliet being so desperate to have sex with him.  

Finally, it is amazing how much of this play has been incorporated into our language; numerous times, I came across commonly-uttered phrases, such as "A rose by any other name", or "A plague on both your houses".  It was like hearing Johnny Cash sing I Walk The Line at the Entertainment Centre, or getting out of the tour bus and seeing Uluru in all its might.  These icons are perfectly comfortable in their own skins, and as well as evoking a thrill of awe, the beholder also shrugs her shoulders and thinks, "But of course!"  Once again, it is proven that the literature we retain, century after century, is the good stuff - plot, poetry, human truths, humour.

Charles Dickens

April, 2012:  I love a beautifully-crafted novel, but if Charles Dickens had slowed down to polish his novels, there would only be six or seven of them, instead of a hundred (please don't correct me, I like to believe there is a lifetime's supply).  The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837) was, of course, written in installments, and it rambles along, just like Mr. Pickwick and his disciples, who set out to see the world very modestly.  I don't think they ever get farther than about twenty miles from London, and their adventures are on a very small scale; much of the fun of Pickwick Papers is derived from depicting insignificant events as momentous, and the homely Mr. Pickwick as a great sage.  There's the chapter titled, 'Too Full Of Adventure To Be Briefly Described': the adventure is Samuel Weller and Mr. Pickwick erroneously breaking into a girls' school, with girls screaming and old teachers getting excited.  Sometimes a chapter is merely an anecdote someone has retailed in a pub.  Dickens always has a pointed message, even when he's having fun: in The Pickwick Papers, his humour flips back on itself, reminding us that in real life, there's nothing insignificant about small-scale events - doing your first back-bend in a yoga class! sending a text message to the wrong person! - and also that Mr. Pickwick's ordinary wisdom is exactly what we need to navigate through our small-scale lives.

While I was reading The Pickwick Papers, I happened to see a friend chasing his hat down Glebe Point Road.  Even Mr. Pickwick loses his hat from time to time, and here's how he deals with it:

There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head; smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else.