All I want

The wonderful Sarah Blasko has a new album out, here is a little mysterious taste, a little cowboy, a little Wuthering Kate Bush Heights - enjoy....

The Taste of Sorrow

I just finished this book, and I don't know how he has done it. We all know the Bronte myth that swirls around the novels, but somehow Jude Morgan makes Charlotte, Emily and Anne full of breathe, almost touchable. The narrative ducks and weaves through first and third person at times, present and past tense occasionally, all those rules we are taught should not be broken. However, instead of alienating the reader, it sucks us further in, until the mud of the moors clings to our trouser hems. Strangely enchanting.

( if anyone would like my copy, send me an email and I will wing it to you, first in best dressed)

Hoot!

Is it just my hormones, or is this owl named Wesley adorable? His little face leapt out at me off the cover of Wesley -The Story of  A Remarkable Owl by Stacy O'Brien, so that I had to buy it.

I have always loved owls, they seem to be arcane messengers. I loved the Athena's Clockwork Owl in the atrocious Clash of the Titans when I was not much taller than a metre. I also remember owls appearing in the pages of particularly English children's books, before Harry Potter. I remember an Alan Garner book had the owls dark stare upon it. A good ten years ago I made an owl for a film, carving his head from foam and binding wire to make his claws. It was with sadness that he was tossed out in the last move, but the film and photos of him still exist. The film was about a boy that turned into an owl. When I was a Brownie, there were older ladies who put us through our knot tying paces named Snowy or Brown Owl. In some Native American Cultures, the Owl is the associated with the night journey of the dead. In Celtic mythology, the Owl along with the Raven is a druid's bird.

I look forward to falling in love with Wesley, just like I did with Chicken in Esther Woolfson's Corvus, and screw my heart up tight, that he doesn't meet his end in the pages of the book.

Study adieu

Why isn't there such thing as a cleaning or organising fairy? If there was, I would love to meet her, I would believe and shout it out three times like in Peter Pan, just to save her from dying. Yet if there was a cleaning fairy, wouldn't we loose the opportunity to glean the catharsis from the sorting and reviewing and ultimately deciding to keep or throw?

These are the last weeks of my room of one's own. In current turmoil as you can see:

There have been garbage bags full of shredded documents making their way to the recycling, old stories, old things, little notes and bits of history, personal and writing wise that I have had to be ruthless with. A whole cupboard has had its gizzards dismantled, the remnants you cans see on the floor. Books that need to find homes on shelves. It is still a mess, but not for long.

Soon my room of one's own will become a baby's room of one's own. It has been my office for five loyal years. Soon I will reclaim a nook in the lounge room. Before the office, I had a nook in a hall way, before then I had a table in the corner of a one bedroom flat. I will make do. I can write anywhere. But I will miss having the room with a view - the red top knotted birds that gorge themselves on the strange red turning berries outside my window. The butcher bird who sharpens his beak on the branch opposite, ready for the hunt when he has earlier out sung the magpie, the leafy tendrils of the trees and the slab of usually blue sky that I take my pause upon.

Good bye nearly, room of one's own.

Ernest and His desk

I have a rather soft spot for Hemingway as a writer, though I have read very little. Mr. G loves him. It often makes me think that Fitzgerald and Hemingway are for me the equivalent of Bronte and Austen is for women. I have my copy of A Moveable Feast to dig into, bought from Shakespeare and Co with its remarkable stamp, but with the three books I bought there, I have been reluctant to open, as if somehow they are graced with some other favour, than being the books that they are.

Some of my favourite writerly anecdotes about Hemingway involve his early years in Paris, how he wrote at those fabulous cafes in Montparnasse, sometimes standing at the bar, happy with his 400 words a day. This is my sort of quotient, quality over quantity. However, that may be a myth. When I saw this photo of Hemingway, it dispelled the easy going elegance of his swaggering youth in Paris, but shows something else. The first thing that struck me was the mirror. Was it because he was a Gemini he had to have it across from him ( yes Gemini's are fond of mirrors), yet that is just his reflection caught by the camera. The door actually is barred by his cabriole legged desk. He seems to be biting his nails and his pj pants reveal, what I could only describe as a vulnerable ankle.

As I prepare to move my study, I too find there is a mirror in a strange spot, close to a door that I am almost near enough to bar anyone from entering. My new writing table too has cabriole legs. Lets hope my nails are rarely bitten and my ankles invulnerable to the breezes of the outside world.

I am not Thomas Keneally

Out Now -Wet Ink 15 is packed with great reads to get you thinking – and laughing – this winter.

Gretchen Shirm changes her perspective through a lost kitten, Bryan Whalen discovers there’s more to telemarketing than picking up the phone and Warwick Sprawson imagines a world where people and mattresses get a little too close for comfort. David Cohen plans a farewell to die for. Plus you can lose yourself in four very different childhood tales from Yasemin Sumner, Emily Fleming, Emma Silverthorn and Sandra Leigh Price.

 Poetry lovers will find plenty to get them through the cold months, with work by Tom Shapcott, Laura Williamson, Peter Bakowski, Aidan Coleman, Geoff Lemon, Lorne Johnson and Stephen Lawrence.

 Plus Martin Edmond muses on stones, Evan Guilford-Blake uses an unexpected part of his anatomy to become a porn star, an interview Thomas Keneally and a stack of book reviews.

 Enjoy!  

from WetInk

One of  my pieces is in this issue, though I am not Thomas Keneally, but it is possible I could be anyone else...

Cheri - book into film

I just came back from seeing Cheri the film, from the novellas of Colette as part of the Sydney Film Festival. On such a grey cold day, it was lovely being swept up into the lush world of the Belle Epoque for an hour or so, but I came out feeling that funny push-pull feeling of seeing a book turned to film, and perhaps not so successfully?

I once heard that a good  book makes a bad film and a bad film make a good book, sometimes this, in my experience has been quite true. I love Colette, and Cheri is not one of my favourites, but her tales are complex maps of emotions that film makers in the past have laid their hands heavily upon them, almost erasing Colette's emotion and observation like rubbing off a finger print. Think of Gigi - I love it - but it is very different from the book, it has broad brushstrokes that make it loveable, but is like eating a macaroon, delightful only while it lasts. Cheri has all the beautiful coloured hues of a window pane full of macaroons - violet, cream, mint, turquoise, but they are not to be meant for meals.

However, it seemed unsure about itself as a film - was it a comedy or  a drama? Why were the actors behaving like they were on a stage? And the worst crime of all - the dreaded voice over. Not only did Stephen Frears the director do the voice over at the beginning, which I suppose set the scene, he condensed the last part of the second Cheri novella, The Last of Cheri, into a few arch sentences that reduced the story and the catharsis, for it isn't until the end of the Last of Cheri that the emotional truth unfolds, that Fred aka Cheri had only ever one love, Lea.

Why on earth did Christopher Hampton allow this to his script or Frears to his film? What about the old adage, show don't tell??