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’.

When I read The Consolations of Philosophy for Bim Bam Book Club, I found out that this book makes some people mad. “Wait,” said a member of my other book club, “you’re not reading that for a philosophy book club, are you?” No, and I didn’t read The Boat for my pirate book club, either. Not to be too snide.

But I did find people’s reactions to this book quite as interesting as the book itself, which is a bit like a self-help book/beginner’s guide to philosophers. That includes my own reaction, which was happily benign/amused/interested until I found out that de Botton has started some kind of “school” of philosophy, where you pay money to have dinner and conversation with other enlightened individuals. Sounds a bit like that Monty Python sketch where the menu given to a couple at a restaurant has topics of conversation on it rather than food items. Then, I must admit, I was less benignly amused/interested. Books that exhort people to be more open to life and its cornucopia of blessings, generally: fine and dandy, even if I don’t want to read them all. But corporatising them? Not sure. Sounds like church.

In a nutshell, if you are a total philosophy newb, like I am, then this book is good because it will introduce you to the characters and words of six very interesting men. De Botton characterises each one as a useful source when one is in trouble (e.g. heartbroken, insecure, poor), which is a nice way of making things direct and simple. If you’re thinking “absurdly reductionist”, wait for the sentence after next. I found the way de Botton personalises the people behind the philosophy helpful because there are so many philosophers that it’s nice to have a friendly (or not very friendly, in the case of Nietzsche) face among the bazillion. But if you are at all “a serious philosopher” then I doubt this book will tell you anything you need to know, although you probably know that already, since you’re quite a know-it-all, aren’t you? Just kidding, I’m sure you’re nice.

George Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair and Eric Blair once lived on the streets. This is a true fact, and here is a true-ish book about it. You can have a look for free here. Down and Out in Paris and London is a clever mash-up of Orwell’s experiences and observations while slumming it in the restaurants of Paris and tramping the streets in London.

Since Orwell had family and friends who were well off in both cities, there’s nothing near the desperation of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. What we get instead is an experimental, but pragmatic breakdown of the minutiae of poverty. And it’s not pretty; we’ve got bugs, sexual harassment, social ostracism and a neverending diet of bread and tea. But on the other hand, there is resourcefulness, mateship and Orwell designs a basic blueprint for a commune that would benefit the English poor, whose hardship Orwell concludes is essentially perpetuated by the state. A wonderful book that will make you think and squirm.

I’m almost embarrassed to write about this book because I finished it way back at the beginning of the year. So much for wanting to remember the things I read. I took it with me to the beach over summer — funny holiday reading perhaps, but it’s a satisfying, pithy and comprehensive book, a great example of Text Publishing’s quick-response, issue-based publishing (see also Henson Case, The).

There are seven chapters, each by a different author addressing a fraught facet of the war in Iraq. Gaita has arranged them in a simple, intuitive order, beginning with Robert Manne’s breakdown of relevant events, progressing through Hilary Charlesworth’s mindful assessment of the legality of the war, and ending rather chillingly with Mark McKenna’s chapter called ‘Howard’s Soldiers’. Though the viewpoints range in the angle taken, the overall tone rather leans towards emphatic, which is not surprising given the take-no-prisoners title.

Why the War was Wrong served an important purpose for me in that it brought together arguments on a state of current affairs in an accessible and coherent way. Much broader and deeper in coverage as a whole than newspapers and even the essays singly, it was a much-needed platform from which to ascertain the nature of my own unease about Iraq.

now i have to read:

• germs by richard wollheim – a passage of which is excerpted in john armstrong’s essay “the heart of desire” as an example of convincing writing about sexuality
• martin heidegger’s being and time - portrayed as having no small influence on how God was historically perceived in guy rundle’s “it’s too easy to say ‘god is dead’”
• anna funder’s stasiland – i was supposed to read it for a book club but i did not, and funder’s essay “the innocence manoeuvre” is an elegant, compassionate tackle of questions posed by the von donnersmarck film the lives of others
• the untouchable by john banville – inga clendinnen suggests this is a successful attempt at reaching the ‘poetic truth’ behind a malevolent historical figure
• the australia institute’s corporate paedophilia report
• definitely something by raimond gaita
• hazel rowley’s tete-a-tete: simone de beauvoir and jean-paul sartre, parts of whose information-gathering process are detailed in her essay
• lavengro by george borrow – a favourite text of the cherished tweed-wearing, hut-building character described in anne sedgley’s “in fealty to a professor”
• something by norman mailer though, because i still haven’t (see below)

but i do not want to read:

• norman mailer’s the castle in the forest: j.m. coetzee puts a good showing in the ring, arguing that the novel keeps the ‘infernal–banal’ paradox in play and condemning the circumstances that allowed hitler’s young impressionable mind to pursue his own education ‘in a state of total freedom’; but inga clendinnen is entertainingly, frustratedly persuasive in showing that arendt’s concept of the banality of evil has been hard done by here, and that ‘the devil made him do it’ is woefully inadequate as ‘poetic truth’