Scorpio: The internet holds a fraction less charm for you this week; your forty-eighth favourite literary blogger has derelicted her posting duty, and only a mid-week apology appears in its usual concentric — Ikea ‘Gustav’ desk, black Apple MacBook screen, Mozilla Firefox, Google Reader — hull. ‘Can you employ ‘concentric’  when speaking of rectangular shapes,’ you ponder.

Even while you excogitate this mystery of meaning, you are not certain whether to be fatigued or merely bored by the insipid excuses she offers. Despite her vow that the swift pace of her life has resulted in such muddle-headedness that she has today mistaken both a plain notebook and a collection of Le Fanu stories for her diary, ‘Fie ‘pon her,’ you think, ‘Blogs are for posting.’

But while you may feel irritated to a minor degree for this transgression, you may also take comfort in the fact that the internet will surely fail. So buck up, rehearse your rendition of a favourite sonnet, and rejoice in the knowledge that strawberry ice-cream, at least, has survived to this golden age.

I’m pretty sure this exact sentence was the straw that broke the camel’s back: ‘It is not the law that the Aboriginal people as holders of any proprietary or possessory rights could not be dispossessed without lateral treaty, lawful compensation or lawful international intervention.’ TRIPLE NEGATIVE, PEOPLE.

*Despite a red-hot go at being one. Okay, it wasn’t even really a go; it was more of a stop.

We hear a lot about the death of language. Whether it’s the death of the author, the novel, the letter – every literary item imaginable has, it seems, been eulogised. Michael Quinion’s Gallimaufry is a delightful book that trawls through the obituaries of the many such fallen soldiers: words that have sailed off into the ether.

A word-nut will have lots of fun with this book. Quinion is an engaged guide, and uses a light writing style, which is a blessing when he navigates the linguistic and historical origins of the words he studies. The title word, gallimaufry, which now means a ‘hodgepodge’, comes from old French. It originally meant a stew or sauce, and it’s still used today, though perhaps only in very enlightened (or pretentious) corners of the English-speaking world. Quinion has divided his enquiry into five thematic parts. The first deals with food and drink, and is of course my favourite; the second with health and medicine; the third, entertainment and leisure; the fourth, transport and fashion; and the fifth, names, employment and communications. Those of you with refined palates will relish the knowledge that the word bottarga (or cured fish roe) – as we know it in Australia – came from the Arabic butarkha originally. There are lots of wonderful little slices through history like this that make you feel like you’re lifting up a magic curtain into the past.

Wonderfully, the thematic division of the book allows you to discover English-speaking habits and cultures that are long fallen by the wayside. Quinion fossicks around in the verbal dirt for things I now kind of regret finding out. Harry Potter fans will know that a bezoar is a ‘concretion of hair or vegetable fibre that forms naturally in the stomachs of ruminant animals’, used once upon a time as an antidote to poison. Men awaiting the barber’s attention used to enjoy the music of a cittern. Also, find out what Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts were about wearing a wig! However, I just couldn’t be enthralled by discovering that the zingerilla and the bransle were fancy lady-and-gentleman dances. Perhaps my fellow Jane Austen readers would beg to disagree.

Despite the subject matter of Gallimaufry being predominantly old and now obscure words, Quinion is certainly no obscurant. There are lots of treasures to be had here for readers of British historical fiction, and even those who once pondered why the Australian Women’s Weekly ‘Dolly Varden’ cake was termed as such. (The Dolly Varden was a rakishly side-slung hat. Though what connection a hat has to a cake with a doll stuck in it, I’ll never have the capacity to fathom.) If you like odd language trivia and showing off your vocabularistic prowess, you will like this book, as it will enable you to say things like: ‘Did you know that “fig” used to mean “banana” in the West Indies at one stage?’ NO, I DIDN’T. And now I do.

NB. I work at Oxford University Press.

So, I’m all kinds of delighted (and a bit shy) about announcing my involvement in Format Festival’s Academy of Words. The Adelaide festival has a fine history of supporting Adelaide’s keen artistic folk by putting on lots of free events, and I’ll be there from 12-14 March. Hopefully those dates won’t coincide with a heatwave, though precedent suggests they will. I’m presenting two events. The first is an Editorial Agony Aunts session, which I’m co-hosting with my one-time interviewee, Dion Kagan. It’s going to be intimate, confessional and hopefully a little bit uplifting. However, Dion and I are both firm believers in failure as key to success and if, by that credo, we depress our faithful attendees too much, we’ll buy them a drink after the session.

The other event is the soon-to-be-famous Literary Friction extravaganza. Hosted by Angela Meyer and yours truly (both wearing slinky dresses and sensible shoes), it promises (well, it promised me) to be a shitfight between festival guests desperate to prove that they are the literary champions of the world (…or, the room). If you love trivia, and if you ‘just love books LOL’, then this is the seedy Saturday night for you. Sensitive, well-read folk only, please.

So, a bit of cheeky crowdsourcing. For those of you who are interested in ‘getting into publishing’, what are you most interested in finding out? And what is the most obscure literary trivia question I could ask that you would get right?

In popular TV show Thank God You’re Here, Australian actors and comedians are thrown into a situation they know nothing about and attempt to make it out alive, as well as angle for a few laughs along the way. Even as only an occasional television watcher, I’m familiar with the dark edges of Bob Franklin’s deadpanning; in this skit, he tells his ‘employee’, a tea lady, that she is not going to be ’sacked’, but ‘put down’. That famously head-cocked view of the world paired with its being the first in Affirm Press’s Long Story Shorts series made Franklin’s début publication, Under Stones, an immediately compelling proposition when Affirm’s Associate Publisher, Rebecca Starford, told me about it late last year. (Note: Bec and I are now colleagues at Kill Your Darlings.)

Franklin’s comedic experience tells in this collection of short stories, but not in the expected tally of belly laughs. (In fact, it’s the most self-consciously quirky story, ‘Thesis Examining a Student’s Path to Crime’, that strikes the one false note for me.) Rather, he’s a deft technician of story and its elements – tension, denouement, character, voice. These competencies serve him well in drawing the reader down through a suburban landscape that is at once familiar and much stranger than we know it. In ‘Ironman’, the first story, Ironman is a high-functioning Australian middle-class hero who ‘pounds the roads’ past the ‘abo’ perched on the beach. ‘Get used to me, I’m part of the landscape now,’ is Ironman’s catchcry, which rebounds between other racially charged insults and his wife’s tired half-silence. The bleakness that Ironman associates with native Australians, however, is visited upon him in a mocking, symbolic and haunting fashion when he arrives home one evening to discover his wife and children have disappeared.

It is clear from this, and many of its companions, that in Under Stones, Franklin has assembled myriad tales of unexpected disturbance and horror that scratch at the wales and wounds we bear. While the situations he describes are unexceptional, the conclusions his characters draw often are. In ‘Soldier On’, Phil, an itinerant but considerate son visits his parents in Paignton, Devon. Phil carps about illicit substances and the painful but necessary observances required of a filial visitor, but he also witnesses an unsettling longing in the elderly he sees around him. At first, it’s reasonable to suspect that his sensitivity is purely a correlate of his discomfort at being a distant son – one visit to the frozen waterside ends in Phil sighting aging faces under the ice. But illicit substances aren’t only for the young and disaffected among us.

Other stories in the collection possess an even more heightened sense of unease. ‘Take the Free Tour’ is a capacious psychological tale that toes the real/unreal divide most chillingly. Its eerie depths are accentuated by the sheer commonness of its protagonist, one Duncan Shaw – ‘unremarkable local reporter by day’ and ‘Dale Thorn, narrator of some of the toughest, most sarcastic private eye adventures that ever failed to impress an editor’ at night. The ‘tour’ of the title is a complimentary gander at a pornographic website, which speedily turns into a fixation. That in itself is no big juice, but the ‘voyeuristic orgy of depravity’ coincides with a number of inexplicable, vile acts at Duncan’s workplace: ‘marks … the colour of pale flesh, and phallic in shape’ turn up on photographs that are supposed to accompany a piece he is writing, and his autumnal desktop background is supplanted by a graphic image of a blonde woman. Endlessly worse manifestations disport themselves, implicating Duncan to his workmates. Frighteningly for Duncan – and the reader – he cannot fathom how these degenerate episodes materialised.

The conjunction of the ordinary and the weird has long been an inspiration to writers, and Franklin is no different. Far from being merely spooky or bizarre tales, the stories in Under Stones effect their rumour of unease on the winds of what we’re already hiding from: fear, the inexplicable and what’s hiding under stones.

The kindly and learned folks at Kill Your Darlings, a new literary journal, asked me late last year to come aboard as online editor. I said yes and may have cried a little bit. We’ve been working incredibly hard on the new website, which looks amazing, and publicising Issue One, which is available from the website and stockists around Australia. Rebecca, Hannah and Jo have been extremely fun and inspiring to work with, and we’ll be doing some special things with the blog, Killings, including podcasts, interviews and reviews. We’ve got Twitter and Facebook accounts as well. Those of you who come here as a result of Googling ‘Michael Williams’ may be interested to know that he’s launching our first issue in Melbourne on March 11. (Stalking is an offence, you know.)

The appointment has coincided with a number of other new projects, including literary festival appearances, reviews for other media outlets and some writing of my own. This means I may be posting here a little less, though I will still manfully be attempting to chronicle my reading here – my memory remains as poor as ever. If you’re a regular ‘click-on, click-off’ visitor of the website, feel free to subscribe by email or RSS! Otherwise, you may miss exclusive pictures of me stuffing my face with small-sized foodstuffs. But, of course, this isn’t a goodbye, not even an attempt to attenuate one. This blog is a goddamn pastel wonderland; why would I want to leave?

Totally boring compared to the first two. Not as fun or nailbiting as the others. I just finished reading this, and I truly cannot remember what happened. I think there was a werewolf?