Let’s talk about this reading list over there to the right. I know some of you won’t be surprised at the number of books that are on it; in fact, I am sure some of you will have a list as long. Possibly longer. But the more tenacious among you might have noticed that some of the books haven’t budged for a long time. Discuss:

The Elements of Style / William Strunk and E.B. White
Just started reading this. I bought it a while back at the university bookshop. I have an illustrated Penguin edition, which is slim and adorable. It has a painting of a basset hound for cover art. It started as a long weekend read, so I’m not sure when I will be picking it up again — probably in snatches here and there, I suppose.

The Unconscious / Sigmund Freud
This book is now subject to the kind of non-reading that should not, in fairness, be represented on the list. I started it as my new regular read a month or so back, but it proved much more dense and difficult than the last Freud I read. Might have to be struck off the list and attempted again later.

A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean / Gary Buslik
I’m reading this to review for Lip magazine, so it’s my current public transport companion (PTC). I don’t usually have more than one PTC at a time, because carrying them around is physically unrewarding. But I am on trains, buses and trams (or waiting for same) for anywhere between 60 and 120 minutes a day, so PTCs generally receive daily attention.

Demonology / Rick Moody
I am somewhere in the middle of this book, and as I mentioned last week, it’s at the bottom of a precarious pile of books on my desk. I have since moved some books from the top of said pile, but Demonology is still far from being liberated from its bunker, I’m afraid.

Delta of Venus / Anais Nin (re-reading)
This is somewhere near the top of the pile that Demonology is trapped beneath. I have been reading it when I get home or sometimes on weekends, because Nin’s simple, direct style is refreshing and amusing. Plus, transgressive sex, anyone? But my interest in it is waning, and I am starting to suspect that I was mistaken in thinking that I’ve read the whole thing before, because the middle section is so boring. Will I finish it? Don’t know.

Sons and Lovers / D.H. Lawrence
I can’t find this anywhere, unfortunately. I am about a third through and would very much like to finish it. As Kanye West’s friends would say, ‘Where are you Yeezy?’ Included on the list more as a reminder to find it.

The Language Instinct / Steven Pinker
This is my breakfast book — I read it every morning during breakfast, which accounts for the slow going. It’s an incredibly interesting book, and a lucidly written one, in which Pinker argues that human beings have an instinct for language. But it’s very dense. I seem to recall that it took me something like a year to finish Pinker’s How the Mind Works, so I expect this one to sit there for another few months. Perhaps when I finish it, The Unconscious can be my new breakfast book.

This post is brought to you by Will Strunk and E.B. White. If you are American, or a writing student living anywhere in the Anglophone world, you will no doubt be familiar with the names of these influential language stylists, and their tag-team work, The Elements of Style.

I only became familiar with The Elements of Style over the last year, through blogs by American editors and writers. It’s a concise guide to writing matters such as usage, misuse, spelling and style, and comprises several Commandment-type rules by Strunk, such as ’13. Make the paragraph the unit of composition’ and some by White, such as ’9. Do not affect a breezy manner.’

Hm. I think I have definitely failed to take heed of the latter. Apart from the forbidden breeziness, there are a couple of rules I particularly noted. First, ‘Use the active voice’. This rule will be familiar to Australian (and other) writing students, I am sure. I’m not sure why, but it’s confronting for me to adhere to this rule. Perhaps I am skittish about my actions. How existential.

Second, and more pressing: ‘Put statements in a positive form.’ I am forever not doing this. I mean, I never do this. As Strunk exhorts: ‘Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.’ I am sure that meandering, negative statements are a sad legacy of my disorganised years at university, during which I wrote not a few (ha!) essays not knowing what assertions I wanted to make.

I know better now, I suppose.

Picture title: ‘My Love Affair with Detritus: Part II: The Desk.’

Anyhow, Julian Burnside — what a funny bastard. For those of you not in the know about the Antipodes’ Atticus Finch, he is a QC and AO, the latter having been bestowed ‘for service as a human rights advocate, particularly for refugees and asylum seekers, to the arts as a patron and fundraiser, and to the law’. You might have noticed him around town in his natty tortoiseshell glasses. Also, he likes words quite a lot, enough to have written a very engaging book about them.

If you’re going to ask me why on earth you should read anything written by someone whom even Lisa Simpson might find an irritating polymath, then you should probably go away and think very hard about your attitude. Then come back and read the rest of what I’ve written about Wordwatching, because you’ll be missing out otherwise. Wordwatching is a blissfully accessible collection of ‘essays’ (I think of them more as ‘riffs’) about words, their meanings, and their histories. What makes it such an agreeable companion is its combination of nerdy humour (one chapter is called ‘All’s Well That Ends -al‘), industrious research, and a love of language which shines through the simple prose.

I’ve already excerpted a couple of choice bits from the innards of the beast, but suffice it to say that Burnside has a wide-ranging pen, and many of his observations in Wordwatching give rise to ‘ohhhhhhhh’ moments. There’s plenty of trivia about words, from the familiar origin of the word furphy (the last name of the Shepparton man who made water carts used in Gallipoli), to the more obscure origins of the word poppycock (from the Dutch pappekak, which means soft shit). One chapter, ‘Deadly Sins’, simply takes a look at the origins of words such as lust, vainglory and gluttony.

Observations on the coming and going of words show that Burnside sits in a mindful spot between the philologist poles of conservatism-at-all-costs and let’s-go-with-the-flow. It’s a stance that I share, and he makes it a very sympathetic one, displaying a clear distaste for the misuse of existing words, and enthusiasm for neologisms that fill the many voids of the English language. Some of the usual suspects are investigated, such as that pet peeve of many English language enthusiasts, ending a sentence with a preposition. That long-lived nuisance is put to bed without dinner, with the aid of examples from Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte.

It’s no surprise, given his work with refugees, that Burnside has included an essay titled ‘Doublespeak’, in which he discusses the troubling Orwellian propensities of the Howard Government’s neoteric, whitewashing terminologies. He also ends the book on a similar note:

The essays in this book are mostly intended as harmless play in the richness of our language. But all play has a larger purpose, and taking pleasure in the language should at least make us concerned to protect it: not from change, but from wilful misuse. When innocent victims of oppression become ‘illegals’; when immigration policy becomes ‘border protection’; when ‘global warming’ becomes ‘climate change’, it is time to be alert and also alarmed.

What a good man. Wordwatching is like a hug for word nerds. As my friend Kelvin would say, ‘get in there’.

Hi. Just in the middle of a spectacular Easter long weekend. Yesterday I joined the Voiceworks crew to proofread the next issue, Budget. It is in tip-top shape — there’s a great article in there by my friend Wendy Zukerman about the government’s scientific research funding, some lovely poetry and a great bunch of short stories. Go forth and buy, etc.

Don’t read the rest of this post if you don’t like talking/hearing about shoes.

In keeping with my semi-New Year’s Resolution to not buy anymore disposable fashion, I haven’t been shopping for about three months. (Apart from an op-shop jaunt last week, which was very successful as rated by the Bold-coloured Pencil Skirt Committee.) The Resolution has done wonders for my bank account, but last night I pressed my forehead to the front window of Evelyn Miles on Collins Street, a high-end shoe store I’ve never been known to even sneeze near. It had ‘Closing Down Sale’ and ‘Nothing over $X’ (where X represents a figure that can make people other than me gasp for totally different reasons) plastered in both windows. Inside I could see a pair of Loeffler Randall shoes I’d been wearing holes through, at least in my imagination. Here’s a picture, in case you’re into that kind of visual stimulation.

My brain started ticking over. I mean, these shoes are usually hideously expensive, even before you consider the exchange rate and postage to Australia. And since the American fashion season is at least half a year ahead of ours, this particular shoe had been sold out from every online vendor I knew except in a different weird size per shop. I think I decided then and there to take a trip to Evelyn Miles when it was open.

This afternoon I jitter-walked down there and had a right old sartorial meltdown because they had the shoes in my size and my preferred colour. There were three other ladies in there doing damage to their wallets, and by the end of a half-hour we were egging each other on to more and more extravagant shoe purchases. So, ladies and gentlemen, I walked out of there with not one, but two pairs of Loeffler Randall boots. You will be pleased to know that they were different to each other. My second inamorata was black, leather, knee-length, two-inch-heeled and front-seamed. Oh my god, slightly ridiculous. I won’t expose you to any tedious justifying self-talk, because that’s what my friends are for, but there was a fairly large percentage involved in the ‘size of discount’ area.

Then I had some sangria with my friend M and played ‘Spot the ex-Big Brother housemate’, a game which is more fun than, and not nearly as proactive as it sounds. After which I met my parents for dinner at Bistro Vue where I had a ‘fat migraine’ and nearly collapsed after polishing off my wagyu steak. Didn’t even have dessert, and I was as horrified as our waiter about that, believe me. I’m usually a ‘give me excess of it; that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die’ kind of girl. I guess the sickening part is just coming more speedily these days.

Dear Easter, you have been tops so far and there are still three days of this weekend to go. Hot potatoes.

Good times with Julian Burnside while reading Wordwatching.

The trivia:

[The expression 'parting shot'] derives from an earlier, metaphorical expression and has replaced it because of their phonological similarity. The original expression is Parthian shot. By about 170 BC the Parthian region was independent of the Seleucid kingdom, and in 55 BC the ineffectual Roman general Crassus was defeated by the Parthians, who used a home-grown tactic to great effect. The Parthian horsement would ride towards their enermy and let fly a volley of arrows, then turn in retreat. Thinking the Parthians’ resources exhausted, the Romas would follow the retreating horsement. But, great horsemen that they were, the Parthians would rise in their saddles and, turning, fire another volley into the unsuspecting Romans. Thus the devastating final shot in apparent or actual retreat became known as the Parthian shot. Here lies the subtle distinction between the two expressions: a parting shot is one necessarily associated with departure; a Parthian shot may be the purpose for a feigned withdrawal.

The understated fun-making:

That great and traditional accompaniment to festive occasions in Australia, the saveloy, is a corruption of the French cervelas: a highly seasoned, cooked, and dried sausage.

In Laxmangarh, a boy is born. There’s definitely no big star in the sky on that night, showing people where to go: his parents don’t give him a name, nor remember his birthday. He’s called munna, or ‘boy’, for the first years of his life. Eventually, the government bestows these missing birthrights upon him, but the flavour of their choices is decidedly off. His new name, Balram, is the name of the god Krishna’s sidekick: one stir of the cement settling the boy’s inheritance of servitude. Balram’s birthday is decided on election day since the government’s corrupt methods requires another 18-year-old voter. Welcome to the Darkness of India.

Holy nuts, I enjoyed reading this book. The internet must be full of information about it, so I won’t bore you with more plot details or anything like that. It definitely deserves a wide readership: it was very engaging, and Adiga is a skilled writer who has created a fresh, light voice capable of discussing anything from fear of lizards to the insane magnitude of the socio-economic gap between India’s rich and poor.

The White Tiger proffers plenty of exquisitely appalling moments illustrating this repugnant power differential. One of these is the scene a few days after a drunken driving spree by Balram’s master’s wife, Pinky, results in the death of a young boy. The family which Balram serves frames him for the crime. It turns out that there were no witnesses, so the death gets buried by the police, but Balram is not informed that he is off the hook:

The Mongoose and Mr Ashok were sitting in front of a TV screen, playing a computer game together.
The door to the bedroom opened, and Pinky Madam came out. She had no makeup on, and her face was a mess – black skin under her eyes, lines on her forehead. The moment she saw me, she got excited.
‘Have you people told the driver?’
The Stork said nothing. Mr Ashok and the Mongoose kept playing the game. ‘Has no one told him? What a fucking joke! He’s the one who was going to go to jail!’
Mr Ashok said, ‘I suppose we should tell him.’ He looked at his brother, who kept his eyes on the TV screen.

But just as Balram was a recusant escapee from the prison of poverty, I never gave in completely to the book’s charm. I guess I’m a slightly captious reader, because, as laid out above, there’s plenty to like about The White Tiger. Balram has just enough emotional depth to make him an amiable narrator, but not much more. Like The Life of Pi, my least favourite Booker winner I’ve read so far, The White Tiger recounts traumatic events, but in the denouement is almost too flippant about what went before. Balram is certainly disconcerted by the murder he’s committed: ‘I am not a politician or a parliamentarian. Not one of those extraordinary men who can kill and move on, as if nothing had happened. It took me four weeks in Bangalore to calm my nerves.’ But what he did in those four weeks, you’re going to have to guess. I don’t think Balram should necessarily have been more apparently wracked. It just meant that I didn’t get so close to him. But a greater meaning is served by this absence of emotional turmoil: whether you are from the Darkness or the Light, India will bring out the brutality in you.

Say what you will about Kanye West, but I love the fool. Particularly the fool who knows the nature of his foolishness:

I have some ego problems, bitched out at award shows, have control issues and make some questionable fashion choices …

However, I’m not on board with Kanye’s perpetuating the idea that calling someone homosexual is offensive and necessarily impugns the subject’s masculinity:

I’m down here in Hawaii in the studio working on music checking out some cool blogs and I run into a pic with me and girl. White Lightning wrote a whole thing about how she heard I don’t like girls and I have a ‘beard’ etc…. What the fuck are you talking about???!!! I know my life is the Truman Show for everyone to judge and comment on but I’m not doing a reality show. I’m not doing anything ‘for the camera’! … never question MY manhood. This is a message to everybody out there!

I understand that implying someone is gay is a common take-down device. But we shouldn’t accept it in the discriminatory sense that it’s meant, no?

***

I have book club on Sunday. Boozy book times = yes.