Ford progress
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford.
Thought this was going to be the next post in the Works in progress series until I picked it up to see how far I’d got ...
Thanks to the author photo on the back you feel like you’ve got yourself a novel by William Hurt in the Blue in the Face/Smoke period; but a dry, frosty wind was blowing outside, the light was pale and wintery and I had bookmarked at the scene where the sportswriter is visiting his girlfriend’s family for the first time. Maybe it was the lazy quiet of the house on a Saturday morning, but the taut prose had me ready to keep reading, like Melville at his best. Writing like this reminds you how much of a foreign language American English is ...
So why’d I stop? The story of a middle-aged middle-brow sportswriter whose marriage fell apart after the death of his son due to a rare disease left me sinking into a depression. His perambulations in the suburban badlands filled me with dread and it was almost impossible to read without feeling like I was headed somewhere just as bad myself ...
Read: 260 of 380 pages.
Likelihood of finishing: Back on the active pile ...
Also in progress: Metaphysical Horror
7 June, 2002
“Copper is very durable, and plenty of copper matrices made in the sixteenth century are still in use. Messrs. Enschedé have matrices in good condition for a type that was used in 1492 ... They embody late forms for some letters and were probably made early in the sixteenth century. They are exactly like those made sixty years ago.”
A View of Early Typography, Harry Carter (Oxford University Press, 1969; reprinted 2002, Hyphen Press).
6 June, 2002
In your neighbourhood
A guy walks down Elizabeth Street dressed like an ancient Briton around the time the Romans arrived: a sleeveless knitted tunic with a hood pulled over his head, a sort of heavy skirt or kilt, and nothing else. His stubby arms are tattooed in celtic designs, he marches along on stubby legs and he has a pretty hairy face; he’s pushing a shopping trolley. A woman (wearing 20th-century clothing) and a baby (wrapped up the way babies always are) are with him.
It’s quite cold — jacket weather. The ancients must have been hardy types.
Another guy walks into the dry cleaner’s draped in lots of gold, his greying hair pulled back in a ponytail, his fingernails long and buffed, wearing a pair of perfectly clean and pressed striped flanellette pyjamas and thongs. He is collecting his entire wardrobe, except one pair of trousers with a stain the cleaner can’t remove. The guy at the counter promises to try something else and the guy goes out.
On second thoughts, the guy steps out of the Honda HRV parked in the drive-through and retrieves the stained trousers, too.
5 June, 2002
A bit pixelated
News of Fisher-Price’s Pixter, described as a Palm for kids, sent me scrambling for links to PixelVision sites. PixelVision was a black-and-white toy video camera F-P used to make. They were the cheapest video option going and gave a heavily pixelated image, bad sound and movies 8 minutes long: in short, they were perfect for no-budget filmmaking.
I was particularly looking for a link to something about a great film I saw at the Melbourne film festival in the late ’90s — a feature-length piece shot entirely in PixelVision about a group of friends who lived in the same apartment block. No luck — but I did find this great little piece on Pixel Porn.
5 June, 2002
Holy stroke
We used to go to south-Asian bazaars or the Greek bookshops of Lonsdale Street for religious items. Our favourites were postcards of Kali wearing a necklace of skulls and orthodox icons made into keyrings and dangly bits for the rear-view mirror on the HR. That was before the Internet.
Meet Jesus of the ballpark. He bats a clean .300, throws a straight fastball and doesn’t chew tobacco, cuss, spit or ruck in the opposition dugout (not until the very last innings, anyway).
He was also spotted in Suwon this evening, helping the United States to a 3-2 victory over Portugal in their group D World Cup match. Amen!
Thanks to Rosanne for the link.
4 June, 2002
Hand me a towel
Jean-Paul Sartre takes a bath with the same soap and water that conservatives are using to scrub down a lot of left-liberals lately. Among other things, he is lambasted because, though “(t)he product of a bourgeois upbringing, he was adamantly anti-bourgeois; the beneficiary of Western education and freedoms, he was stridently anti-Western, especially anti-American”. Hmmm, heard that plenty recently ...
4 June, 2002
Robo roach
When computers finally write the history of the post-human world, they will note with irony (if artificial intelligence experiences irony) that the stormtroopers of their victory over humankind were a whole lot of children’s toys. How else were they going to infiltrate suburbia?
The insects that survive the silicon holocaust will also get a laugh when they learn that cheap distributed bug intelligence proved a better model than the big-brained smarts of the humans who built the roachbots.
3 June, 2002
Cycling along Merri Creek a week or so ago ... found a whole lot of pieces of white paper fluttering from trees and shrubs along the path.
It was a lost dog notice for a Neapolitan Mastiff puppy, asking for the return of the puppy soon, or, failing that, for whoever found it to take good care of it.
The notices had been spiked on the bare branches of trees along a 50-metre section of the path and hung there, damp from a morning of rain and looking as if they’d been washed up out of the creek with rubbish from the stormwater drains.
Today Lost turned up — a book of lost pet posters, no less.
There are posters for lost dogs, cats and assorted other animals, including (judging from the drawing — the poster is in German) a cow. Favourites include the Italian lost dog poster headed “WANTED”, a Californian one for a cat that went missing during an earthquake, someone desperately seeking a poodle called Susan, a missing black labrador with no collar and no legs, and another poster from California for the inevitable lost snake.
3 June, 2002
Men in masks and rubber coats are pumping something out of the cooling
towers on the roof next door with large, industrial vacuum cleaners ... I see from their relaxed stances that they are talking nonchalantly about something else as they do it. It reminds me of that moment on a passenger jet when you hear an unusual thump and you look to the attendants to see if you need to panic.
Italian film maker Mario Bava is revisited in LA.
2 June, 2002
Works in progress
More unfinished business from the bookshelves
Metaphysical horror, Leszek Kolakowski
...the kind of book you’d pick up when you’re browsing on a Sunday without serious intent — small, slim, written by an Eastern European you’ve never heard of and a steal at $20. Kolakowski muses on the possibilities opened by philosophy surviving its own death, on what it means to know that it is impossible to know ... at under 130 pages it looked a snack; for some reason it has been bookmarked on one of my shelves at page 120 since June last year, a mere eight pages short of solving the metaphysical problem once and for all.
Read: 120 of 128 pages
Likelihood of finishing: Who can say ... anything?
Another work in progress: Proust unread
1 June, 2002
Gave Pirate’s Choice by Orchestra Baobab a spin before the France-Senegal World Cup game last night ... the steady rhumba hypnotised the French defence and a snaking guitar line found a route to goal ...
It’s not Japanese and not Indian, not curry and not yakitori; it’s a meal in a bowl, true fusion cuisine; a big ladle of curry gravy and a couple of skewers of soy-grilled chicken on a bowl of rice and green beans — and don’t forget the pickles. It’s curry chicken don for only $5.50 from Don Don ...
