Tag Archives: travel

The books of life: By the Book by Ramona Koval

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By the Book Ramona KovalThis feature interview was first published in The Big Issue no. 421.


Text Publishing
9781922079060
November 2012 (buy hardcover, ebook)

Ramona Koval’s enthusiastic explorations of literature would be familiar not only to those who enjoyed her long-running ABC Radio National program, The Book Show, but also to audiences at writers’ festivals around the world. As an interviewer, she is informed, curious and bold, coaxing a multitude of insights from her subjects. In By the Book, Koval swings the spotlight on herself and asks how a life of books has informed her as a person.

Central to Koval’s development, growing up in St Kilda and North Balwyn in Melbourne, was her mother, a Polish Jew with an amazing story of her own. Koval opens By the Book with an image of her mother, stretched out on the divan, lost in a book. Koval’s mother read in multiple languages and had a fondness for banned books. She would regularly take her young daughter to a mobile library, which ‘introduced her to a different world’. This was important, Koval writes, because as a child she ‘didn’t exactly have wide horizons to survey’. Books provided those.

Ramona Koval

Ramona Koval

Koval describes the books we keep close as presenting an ‘archaeology of interests’, and says those she selected for discussion in her own book were ‘the ones that were crucial milestones for me in some kind of way’. From the works of French novelist Colette to books on polar exploration, European and absurd literature, language books, feminist books, and the poetry of science, Koval’s reading interests have been broad. In her reflections on reading, she wonders about whether there is a ‘right time’ to encounter a certain work while arguing that books can, undeniably, shape you. Koval felt this acutely while gripped by Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watchtower just this year, and believes if she’d read the novel at a young age, it might have changed the course of her life. ‘I saw several episodes in my own life mirrored in its pages,’ she writes.

On the other hand, Koval admits that worth classics she’s interested in reading—such as the Sagas of Iceland—have sometimes failed to draw her in. ‘You’ve got limited time,’ she says. ‘I always think that if you give a book a while and then you don’t fall into it, you just have to put it away and come to it another time, or not come to it at all.’

Along with genuine insights on reading itself, Koval’s book is personal. We learn about the author’s young life, her passion for science, and her adventures (and disappointments) in love. We also get to travel with her, through her own experiences and through associated literature. One such adventure is going dog-sledding in the Algonquin State Park, three hours north of Toronto. Koval also shares some of her encounters with authors, such as Grace Paley and Oliver Sacks.

She acknowledges the privileges her career as a broadcaster has afforded her. ‘It has been fantastic; my own Open University,’ she says. ‘You can learn a lot of things by reading books, but for some books I think you do need to have a tutor—some fantastic person who can say to you “look at this” or “this means that”’.

Koval herself has opened up worlds for others in her years as a broadcaster. She admits that her reading choices have mainly been governed by whatever happened to interest her personally, ‘whether it was a book about sand or some short stories from Romania’.

It’s a formula that seems to have worked. ‘It turned out that other people loved [these works] too,’ Koval says. ‘Many people sidled up to me and said, you know, “your program was my education. I never would have read those books if I hadn’t heard about them”’. Koval always enjoyed this aspect of her work. ‘It’s not like you’re powerful; it’s more like you’ve got something to share that’s valuable. People are enriched by it.’

Koval is now working on, and planning, multiple projects that will make the most of her enthusiasm and talents. And she continues to be a great reader, keeping up on reviews in various publications. ‘Reviews are so hard, aren’t they?’ she says. ‘Because you have to trust the reviewer, and even then you’ve got to know a little bit of backstory about why they feel that way about that book, or whether they’ve got an axe to grind in some way.’

There are still many books on Koval’s shelves and in her ereader that she’d love to get to. ‘Sometimes you feel like: I’m actually gorging on books and I’m going to be sick if I don’t stop it,’ she laughs. ‘You know, you can have too much ice cream.’ But reading, for Koval, is a unique pleasure; something she describes in By the Book as ‘private and reverential’. It’s an activity that can transport us ‘from our prosaic lives to anywhere we care to imagine’. She writes: ‘While our world looks small on the outside, it’s huge on the inside, in the magical spaces between the page and our absorption.’

New York, Noo Yawk for Killings

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I wrote a piece for Killings (the blog of literary magazine Kill Your Darlings) on my eventful trip to New York City. It begins:

Like Loco, Pola and Schatze I was drawn to New York City to find a millionaire playboy. Wait, that’s not right. But in my nine days in NYC I did sometimes feel that I was acting a part in a movie. The island of Manhattan itself feels elevated somehow, surreal. In my photographs taken from the Brooklyn Bridge the city has a certain cardboard cut-out effect. I ran into the cultural ghosts of Ninja Turtles in Chinatown, Dana Barrett on Central Park West, King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, and Joe Buck next to a neon sign.

But the city is not elevated, isolated, a movie set. While I was there, very real events were occurring, and had occurred. People were affected by these, not just in New York, but around the world. So the city to me was both a hyperreal version of itself (and a trip often glosses over like a dream afterwards, too) and a place where, of course, people breathe and bleed.

I hope you’ll enjoy the rest by clicking here.

Reading for pleasure

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The last week of my overseas trip and the week to come (in Fremantle for my best friend’s wedding) were and are my final weeks of leave from Uni, so I was keen to sneak in some ‘pleasure reading’, which basically means that I don’t take notes. Nonetheless I wanted to share with you some of the books I’ve enjoyed and am enjoying.

On the flight over to the US, on Halloween, I devoured the second novel in Tara Moss’ Pandora English series, The Spider Goddess, which I’d been saving up for just that purpose. I’m going to grab a copy of the third book, The Skeleton Key, very soon (the first is The Blood Countess). The series is about Pandora English, an aspiring writer who moves in with her great aunt (who looks unnaturally young) in the hidden New York suburb of Spektor. Pandora is discovering not only that there is a secret (and often sinister) world behind things, but that she has some special talents of her own. The series is ridiculously fun, especially if you, like me, are a fan of that dark aesthetic (think Hammer Horror films, or Tim Burton). The books are also partly satirical of the fashion world, while maintaining a genuine interest in style, or glamour. If you’ve read interviews with Moss, or her blog and tweets, you’ll know that for a long time she’s loved the macabre, and that she has a crush on Bela Lugosi. These books are born of genuine interests. I’m a fan.

On the flight over I also began Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, because, as mentioned, I was giving a paper on her previous novel Eat the Document, and because I’d been meaning to read it since it came out. I finished it in New York, and am still thinking about it. It’s crazy that she’s not more lauded, more well known. Even in the US I did not meet one person who had heard of her, and I talked to a lot of bookish people. Her books so keenly reflect aspects of Western contemporary life (though that is too broad a description) that perhaps they’ll only be properly appreciated once the present is past. In Stone Arabia, there is a brother and sister; he’s a musician and an obsessive chronicler, she cries over the news and spends hours googling symptoms. Again, I’m going to point to James Bradley’s review, as he’s done a great job of summing up the novel.

I began Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World on the flight home and already it is getting inside of me, as his other books have. I don’t know how he imbues his sentences with such weight. It’s difficult to describe what this book is about. It’s about people. At the beginning, there are two families shaped by loss. The two boys, Jonathan and Bobby, come together, and grow, and the reader also follows the point of view of Alice, Jonathan’s mother, and Clare (but I’m not up to her yet). Last year I wrote quite a long post about Michael Cunningham, after he’d been in Australia. You can read that here.

Finally, in Brooklyn at PowerHouse Books I picked up a copy of New York Stories (Everyman’s Pocket Classics), and I’ve read about half. Highlights have been Truman Capote’s ‘Master Misery’, John Cheever’s ‘O City of Broken Dreams’ and Shirley Jackson’s ‘A Pillar of Salt’ (a great story about how a big city can overwhelm and ultimately disable you). Most of the stories so far have been along the lines of broken dreams, and a city that draws you in with bright lights but then gets you down or takes advantage of you. The stories are set in the New York of Mad Men and back much further. There are some contemporary ones to come. I’m hooked on them. Though I had such a great experience of the city I’m sure for many it still is a place of broken dreams. Aren’t all big cities? So much promise, but so many people. So expensive.

I learnt a new word while reading this collection. Many of the characters, the down-and-out ones, ate at Automats. I said to Gerard, ‘what is that? Do they still exist?’ We looked it up and it seems that an Automat was a fast-food restaurant which basically consisted of vending machines. Patrons put in a coin and pulled out their wax-wrapped food. The kitchen was on the premises. Here’s a great description (and image) of the Automat. I’m not sure why but the Automat has captured my imagination. Perhaps it could be the setting for a story of my own…

New York, New York

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It’s election day in America and I’m about to go spend the day at MoMA. People seem a little anxious; here on the east coast they’ve just been through Sandy and New York City is only just beginning to get back to normal. Last night it was very loud on the Lower East Side when I woke up in the middle of the night, but it was kind of soothing since my first couple of nights were so quiet. Even though I’ve never been here before I knew it was unnatural.

I’ve had an amazing few days in New York. I might write about Georgia and the conference later, but ‘I’m in a New York state of mind’ right now. On Sunday I went along with the woman I’m staying with (who is awesome) to help clean up an artist’s studio in Brooklyn that had been flooded. It was devastating. She works with wood so there was a lot of warping, and mould. The water was brown and stinky so we had to wash and dry out everything. She’d been working on it for a couple of days and by the end of Sunday the studio was beginning to look like a studio again, with the help of many people. Her equipment was ruined, though. So sad. She wasn’t the only one in the building, either. Or, of course, in the suburb.

Anyway, I was glad I was able to do something, since I arrived just after the superstorm. I started my tourism proper yesterday by:

1. eating a cream cheese bagel where Harry met Sally
2. walking from LES to Times Square and buying MAC lipsticks (thanks to my friend Kate Middleton, who has made me determined to be a ‘lipstick-wearing person’)
3. ate at a Seinfeld-style diner and overheard many post-Sandy catch-up conversations
4. did an aerial yoga class
5. caught the subway, a bus and a yellow cab
6. saw Argo at the gorgeous Village East Cinema
7. went to The Strand bookstore (amazing)
8. celeb-spotted Jeff Daniels in dark glasses

Being in New York is not really like the abstract, piecemeal idea I had of New York. Yes, I relate almost everything to something in the cultural memory bank, but I never had a grasp on the grandeur of the place; actually being among those tall buildings. Also, the city belies stereotypes (so far) just as Paris did for me, in that the people seem very friendly: saying hello, smiling, talking, having a joke. I would say that the stereotype about New Yorkers always being in a rush, however, would be true. I don’t understand why there aren’t more traffic accidents! But it’s like a game you have to learn. As soon as you understand the logic of when to cross the road and how to react to a bike zooming past you, you can just fit right in.

Gerard and I were discussing the city the other night on the phone (he was here for a few weeks in 2010) and we agreed that there’s something surreal about it. When you’re in Manhattan it feels as though you’re apart from the world, almost like the island were floating a little above. Gerard said it’s a bit like one giant movie set, and I’d agree. The feeling doesn’t seem to be simply related to seeing the streets in films, but then maybe it is. Who knows how that accumulation of pop culture might affect your reactions? The film Metropolis was one of the first to enter my head when I arrived coming over the Williamsburg bridge. Then I’ve had flashes of Woody Allen (of course), the Nolan Batman films, Ghostbusters (especially with all the military vehicles in the street due to the relief efforts), King Kong and more. 

So on my list still is art deco (including the Empire State Building), seeing this David Hyde Pierce-directed play featuring Sigourney Weaver (and as my sister suggested, I should combing this activity with a trip to Dana Barrett’s apartment building in Ghostbusters), lots of art, and maybe some comedy…

Going to America

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Feels strange that I’m flying to the US tomorrow as I sit here glued to live feeds from Hurricane Sandy. I’m due to arrive in Dallas on Wednesday afternoon, then fly straight to Atlanta. But it probably depends how far inland/south the storm comes. I’m a bit worried as I’m due at a conference at the University of West Georgia, in Carrollton, by Thursday evening. I’m also going to in NYC on Saturday, but with the volume of flights they’ve had to cancel, I wouldn’t be surprised if that one gets delayed.

I’ve never been to New York, and I hope when I get there it’s still intact… I’m feeling for all the people on the east coast, particularly those who may be separated from loved ones. Must be pretty damn scary.

The conference I’m going to is called Systems of Control/Modes of Resistance, and I’m giving a paper called: ‘”All can be and will be commodified”: bottom-up resistance and corporate incorporation in Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document‘. Eat the Document is set in two eras—the 1970s and the 1990s—and there is a comparison between the way the characters in each era protest or resist corporate power. I argue that while the actions of the ‘radical’ protesters in the 1970s may have failed, the small, peaceful movements of the 1990s characters often only confirm, or conform to, the systems of power in a market-based society. I think the novel is pretty pessimistic, overall, about our ability to resist a culture that readily incorporates, pre-empts and commodifies resistance, but there is one character who remains hopeful, so she provides a contrast. It’s a great read, by the way, I highly encourage you to pick it up (my 2008 review is not very well written, but gives you more an idea of the story). I’m finally going to read Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, too, on the plane over (see James Bradley’s review of that one here).

And that gives you a bit of an idea of what I’m writing about in my thesis, too, something I’ve rarely talked about on LiteraryMinded. I guess because until now (where I have a complete draft of my novel and a very rough draft of my exegesis) I was very much still in a process of ‘working out’. There is also the case that in the academic world, you have to present original ideas to the examiners, so you can’t go spilling them out willy-nilly. When I’m finished, though, I do hope to write some more accessible-style essays for non-academic publications, on the subjects I’ve been looking at. And I’ll write more about the whole process of doing a DCA, here on the blog, when I’m finished in March.

I’m looking forward to the conference, not just listening to the papers (which all sound fascinating), but the Southern accents! And I look forward to eating some grits and drinking sloe gin. I’m sure I’ll have internet here and there, so I’ll send you a missive. I’m back in Aus on the 13th of November.

Home, strange home: Fishing for Tigers by Emily Maguire

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Picador, 9781742610832
September 2012 (buy paperback, ebook)

A version of this article was originally published in The Big Issue no. 415.

Somewhere around the six-week mark of Emily Maguire’s 2008 visit to Hanoi, she realised she was in love: ‘Actual love—the kind where you wake up smiling in anticipation, and you fall asleep deeply, deeply happy every night,’ she says.

Maguire was working in the English translation department of a Vietnamese publishing house as part of a residency through the cross-cultural institution Asialink, and says falling for the city took her entirely by surprise.

‘I’ve travelled quite a bit and I can find something to appreciate or enjoy about almost everywhere I’ve been, but I’ve never had the experience of loving a place like that’. Hanoi became the setting for Fishing for Tigers, the acclaimed author and journalist’s latest novel.

It’s the story of thirty-something Mischa, who has been living in Hanoi for six years, bearing the scars of an abusive relationship. She is satisfied, living day-to-day, in Vietnam. Then an ex-pat friend introduces her to his 18-year-old Vietnamese-Australian son. Cal is attractive, idealistic and kind. Mischa and Cal explore the city, exchanging ideas. They also begin to explore each other.

‘Mischa is not in Vietnam during a time of war, but she is, like Thomas Fowler [of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American], resistant to the idea that anything going on around her is her business,’ Maguire explains. ‘She thinks of herself as outside of Vietnam’s social and political history and present circumstances. She thinks of herself as a disinterested observer, but Cal forces her to face up to her own complicity.’

Emily Maguire

Cal causes an awakening in Mischa, as do the stories of the Vietnamese women Mischa encounters through her work. ‘Vietnamese history—ancient and recent—is full of stories about incredible female warriors and Mischa admires them even as she recognises that the on-paper veneration of powerful women does not carry over to their lived experience,’ Maguire says. ‘The truly impressive thing about Vietnamese women warriors is that they sacrificed themselves for the good of their people. Mischa has been, necessarily, very self-centred for years… But [her] intensifying relationship with Cal forces her to think about herself again as someone whose actions and words affect others.’

This is compounded when Mischa’s sister back in Sydney becomes very ill. For Mischa, Maguire says, ‘that tension between self-protection/fulfilment and care for others becomes kind of unbearable.’

In Fishing for Tigers, Mischa and Cal’s relationship is treated with maturity, as are the other complex, charged bonds between characters in Maguire’s novels Taming the Beast (2004), The Gospel According to Luke (2006) and Smoke in the Room (2009). It’s plausible that the characters are drawn together, and their age difference is not sensationalised. Concepts of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are explored as being both separate, and fluid. Maguire herself feels ‘powerfully tempted’ to stay in Vietnam whenever she is there, but says she also misses her family back in Sydney. ‘If I’m away, I’m missing them painfully and if I’m home, I’m yearning to be gone. Still, it’s a nice tension—being pulled between love and wonder and back again.’

In the character of Mischa, Maguire is investigating a more extreme and disorienting form of tension between competing ideas of home. Mischa has come to Vietnam to remove herself from a damaging situation. ‘Home has been kind of a horror for her,’ Maguire explains. ‘But even as she comes to love Hanoi, she doesn’t “belong” there in any real sense of the word. She doesn’t speak the language or have more than a shallow understanding of the culture,’ Maguire continues. ‘And yet, in terms of feeling a sense of rightness with where she is… then that’s Hanoi. It doesn’t make sense, it shouldn’t be true and yet it is. She feels right being there and that’s that.’

Cal’s background provides contrasting ideas of belonging. He is overwhelmed by many aspects of Vietnam, including what he perceives as commercialisation and Westernisation. In the scene where Mischa and Cal visit the Cu Chi tunnels, an underground network that once served as a base for Viet Cong guerrillas, Cal, disturbed, asks: ‘What kind of country turns this kind of shit into a goddamn tourist park?’ Mischa’s reply is: ‘Every kind.’

But there’s an awareness that grows in Cal, especially once he visits the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (which most of the characters still call ‘Saigon’): ‘He doesn’t want to think of Vietnam’s history as his, but it absolutely is,’ Maguire says. ‘His life is what it is, because his grandparents chose to take their kids and become part of the diaspora.’

As with Maguire’s other works, both fiction and nonfiction, the style is natural and elegant but the essence is deep. There are questions here of not just where but how and with whom (if anyone) a person can belong. And there are even bigger questions regarding one’s place in existence. The characters are memorable and the descriptions of place have the ability to stir longing in the reader.

Maguire has been back to Vietnam for at least a month every year since 2008. She’s seen significant changes in even this short time and, as her relationship with the city deepens and her experiences gain context, she begins to notice more, or see the same things differently. Now, the very familiarity of the place works on her: ‘[When] I arrive now I have this whole physiological reaction as soon as I hear and smell and breathe Hanoi. I feel lighter and happier and ultra-alert,’ she reflects. ‘I head out on long walks without a map and I feel alive and alert and weirdly, impossibly, home.’

—

This post will be added to my tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

Abstract extracts from my travel journal: June to August 2011

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This is cross-posted from Southerly, where I’ve been blogging in December.

This post is partly a peek into my process. If you read more of my writing you may notice thoughts, imagery, themes popping up that originated from this trip and my recordings. But I like to think these carefully chosen ‘abstract extracts’ – deliberately taken out of context – form a little narrative of their own.

Paris

Cars and motorbikes honk, a man vomits into the bin and hobbles away. We are halfway around the world, we desperately need showers and we are happy.

…the best part of the day, I think, was all the stairs and the things they led to.

Notre Dame chimeras. Tongues out, biting, depressed, smirking, scratching, hiding, leaping… you become so intrigued by the possible personalities of the artisans.

Can you imagine anyone embarking on a project that might take 200 years to complete?

Poor prisoners slept on straw, slightly richer ones had rough beds and slept two a-piece. Wealthy or famous prisoners had a writing desk and bed, and a few other comforts, even if they were going to the guillotine.

In Louveciennes. Meat wrapped in string. Like roast beef but better. They call it bird without a head (or something) though Jacques didn’t know why. Started with a P.

Cinémathèque. A donkey suit worn by Catherine Deneuve. A starfish of Man Ray’s. Edison peepy thing. A turban worn by Mae West.

The catacombs. Close air, quiet, the dead elegantly, artfully and respectfully arranged. Being so far underground – the womb and the tomb. Like crossing over for a moment. Then on the surface again (back above the trains and sewage) it’s bright, loud and you can see the skulls in the heads of passersby.

The smells: sewage, smoke, aftershave, electricity, baking.

In Montmartre, Gerard looked up at a window on a quiet street and an old lady waved to him.

London

Globe Theatre. My stomach was clenched so badly during the whole sequence when Hero is shamed.

Edinburgh

Having a day where like:
my skin is bad
I’m tired
I’m not getting enough work done
there aren’t enough bloody toilets in any city
there are too many people
I want a dog
I keep saying tomorrow
I don’t feel well

Benromach: fiery – hint of smoke. Perfect for this mood.

A few things about Edinburgh:
uneven floors
all sorts of lighting, making us look like ghosts or leather
pierced people, dogs
green + stone
authentic tiny pubs

I’ve been to the castle before. For some reason I love the Prison of War exhibition: the doors etched with initials and different types of ships (and some kind of spotted animal – a dog?), the hammocks, plastic bread and cheese. I also like the cells where the misbehaving army men were kept. They created all sorts of punishment for them, including lifting a heavy iron ball from one box, putting it in another, taking one back to the first, etc.

An idyllic childhood is associated with its own breed of pain: that everything afterwards comes as a shock.

Scottish Highlands

Wanted to sit all day in one glen we stopped in, and think.

Secret, slippery steps to the ruins of a castle, on private property. A castle that inspired the romantics. Dripping, dank, pebbly, dangerous. On one side: the sea, ships, sundown. On the other: trees growing out of rock, the sleepy town of Oman. Giggles, flexed calves, camaraderie. Sharing memories of grandparents, and sensations (smell, taste, touch). It’s late.

Driving: green, rich forest. Stones along driveways. Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’. Black-and-white-faced sheep, houses with turrets, churches, whisky and fudge stores.

Little old graveyards, yellow and purple flowers.

Glen Ogle: the valley of death.

Rannoch Moor – 58 square miles of nothing. Largest uninhabited land in Europe (so romantic).

Eighteen warm-blooded reptiles. 1100 sightings from this boat on sonar. He’s seen 10 in person.

1500 bodies buried (killed in 35 minutes).

Edinburgh again

Thinking about the scientific process of making whisky. Something clear that you can learn, master and adapt – unlike reading and writing about/applying postmodern theory. I come across concepts that enthral me: Levinas on sensibility, Jameson on pastiche, but then it all becomes a big mash in my head. When I go to write (and speaking about it is even worse) the right things don’t surface or connect. The connections are there, I know they are. Articulation is a problem, one that makes my head (and to an extent, my heart) feel very heavy.

Jolly Judge looks cosy and inviting. Roof beams from a 300 y/o sailing ship. Half a pint of dark beer: McEwans. Toilets smell like peat smoke.

The Scott Monument: largest single monument of a writer anywhere in the world.

The Museum of Childhood. Porcelain faces, miniature representations of life in dollhouses, a doll made out of a shoe for a slum child, marionettes, children’s stories (and stories by clever 12-year-olds), meccano sets, baby dolls, teddy bears (roughened by age and love).

London again

Michael Cunningham, Guardian book club. ‘I am sentimental and optimistic.’ ‘Every novelist all engaged in this doomed, collective effort to write the whole world.’ ‘…depressive, always have been. So the whole notion of facing down hopelessness and having the courage to live is something I feel I bring…’ ‘…trying to write or trace some human truth large or small.’ Virginia Woolf felt she failed after every novel… not capturing everything. ‘We are all potentially epic figures in our own stories.’

Chain pubs, McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner.

Bethlem. Olivia Gillow: paintings of a fellow patient’s OCD handwashing. Vonn Stropp: compulsive painter, though it’s ‘painful’. He has adopted 123 names by deep poll and has three birth dates. Cynthia Pell: sad and painful drawings. Was at Bexley in the ’70s. Committed suicide. Imma Maddox: weaving, printmaking, schizophrenia. 17th century alms boxes.

Victorian-era building
funnel chandeliers, clown faces
tall mirrors, cherubs, booths
drinking a bramble
after the pictures by crazy (sane)
people and ephemera from the
hospitals

Ministry of Sound. Noise warnings, people like people anywhere, dancing, looking across at G and loving him for getting drunk enough to enjoy it (‘it’s just not my thing’ he said earlier in the day). It’s not really mine, either: but then, everything is my thing sometimes.

Forests as a metaphor for the imagination – the surrealists.

Rothko’s paintings seem as though they could swallow you whole. Then I started to see them as doorways.

Bar Soho. Camden Town. Bloody Mary. The coughing. Is it just the London air? A deep, dry, tickly cough. Pulls on my stomach. The tube tonight: no air. London bathrooms down stairs. Sweaty.

Spaciousness: physical and textual geographical references can be found in the Bloomsbury Group’s work.

Gloucestershire (& surrounds)

Golden Glory Ale.

Went to a 1500-circa house today, creaky lovely oak floors.

Antiques and willows.

I get overwhelmed, tired, I can’t keep up like some people can. I don’t think I’d have admitted this a few years ago. But anyway, other things about here: the birds, the garden – tiered, full of luscious berries, peas, other veg – the pups, Sapphire and Grouse. The lunches of cold meats, olives, cheeses, scotch eggs, cold pork pies, bread, ryvitas and seed crackers. English mustard!

Objective – pah!
No one is objective.

World drops away…

Queen Victoria never revisited Bath after her ankle was insulted by an 11-year-old.

We’ve only had two, maybe three, alcohol-free days in our trip so far.

Things I’ve noticed I say a lot in broad company:
‘Oh well.’
‘Well there you go.’

I touched the sulphurous, greeny water today at the baths before I read the sign. G said I might turn into a mutant.

Bucharest

A great big medieval (or slightly later?) palace with a statue of Vlad the Impaler was being uncovered and restored in the city centre. Gravestones were piled up on the grounds.

Art Deco… one particular one with most of a facade intact and a rotting roof with the sky poking through. It could have been rotting or it could have been burnt.

Brasov to Budapest

An old man told me ‘I love you’ several times, offered to buy me wine, with ‘no obligation’ and pulled at my bra. At first I was polite, well, at first-first I pretended not to understand. When he pulled my bra I said ‘no touch!’ Then a Canadian girl asked if I had any girly things and we had a nice chat.

We had a long D&M conversation about life before realising, humorously, we are on the same train line as those characters – Jesse and Celine – in Before Sunrise.

Budapest

The particular golden, honey-like light bathing buildings (neo-classical) and faces at twilight.

We took the old railway to one of the world’s oldest zoos. The coypu came out of the water and scrubbed itself with little hands like a little person.

Paprika. Palinka.

The history in this part of the world – so recent – is not just dark, but incredibly complex.

Prague and Kutná Hora

Busy. Huge crowds, noisy douchebags sucking at beer cans, old men spitting in the gutter.

St Nicholas Church. My first proper taste of a decadent, baroque interior.

The Sedlec Ossuary. The bone sculptures/arrangements – a chandelier, chalice, coat of arms – don’t seem strange, just bright and artful. The smell, when we walked in, reminded us both of the catacombs. So that really was human bones I’d been smelling there. A not-quite earthy smell, maybe a bit like dust and lemon.

Still tied, for me, inevitably with Kafka.

At Kutná Hora our guide, Jana, spoke seven or eight languages.

She told us about having to go to confession as a six-year-old girl, prior to the communist regime (which the Czechs often refer to as the ‘communistic era’ or the ‘communistic time’). She and her little friends would stand around going ‘what’s really bad?’ ‘what’s a sin?’ as at six, of course, they had nothing to confess.

A folktale about the medieval girl haunting the narrow, curly, sloping lane we walked on, as her rich father locked her in the walls so he’d never lose her to marriage and have to pay out a dowry. She floats above the lane in white and only attacks men.

Tempeh matters: the launch of Janet De Neefe’s Bali: The Food of My Island Home

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This is cross-posted from Southerly, where I am blogging in December.

Recently I attended the launch of Janet De Neefe’s new cookbook Bali: The Food of My Island Home. De Neefe moved to Bali 26 years ago after falling in love with the place and with a local man. She has founded two restaurants in Ubud: Casa Luna and Indus. She also founded the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which I have attended twice: once as an audience member, once as a guest of the festival.

Gado Gado in Ubud

Her large and lavish launch brought a bit of the Ubud Writers and Readers Fest to Melbourne. We sampled tempeh, arancini balls, beef carpaccio with garlic aioli and potato, shallot and paprika tortilla, among others. I drank the De Bortoli Emeri Sparkling (there were also Mud Club wines on offer). There was a performance by two beautiful Balinese dancers, which took me back to my two trips to Ubud. Though there wasn’t the heat, the smells, the sounds outside of clucking chickens and hooting monkeys.

Speeches and performances were hindered by the large crowd but Ezra Bix did a great job MCing and shushing (besides a slight faux pas introducing the director of international tourism promotion for the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Tourism Nia Niscaya as the wrong sex). Niscaya said in her opening speech there was ‘no more sincere love than the love for food’ and she hopes De Neefe’s next book will also explore other parts of Indonesia (outside of Bali). I hope to explore other parts of Indonesia, and South East Asia, one day too.

Nam Le gave the launch speech, where he compared the multitasker and ‘woman of many names’ De Neefe to the Great Gatsby. There is ‘some essential mystery’ about her, he said. They both own property, are unflappable, ignore the rules of time, are self-made, larger than life and have some darkness in their pasts… It was all very tongue-in-cheek, of course (and much better expressed that I’ve put it here). Le was a guest of the Ubud Festival last year.

Janet De Neefe

But there is some essential mystery about Janet. She manages to hold so many balls in the air, and essentially remain generous, calm, and a friend to so many. Family matters to her, writing and art matter, Indonesia matters, people matter, parties matter. And food matters.

Lily Yulianti Farid read a story about three women in one house in Makassar. Farid is the director of the Makassar International Writers Festival, and she told us she was encouraged by Janet to start this festival in her home town.

The final performers were some of my favourites: Emilie Zoey Baker, with her poem ‘Wet’, and Sean M Whelan and Isnod with three pieces about love and loneliness (find one here: ‘They Don’t Love Blue Like I Do’).

I feel lonely today, at the time of writing this. My sister has just left the house. She’s flying off to South East Asia for three months: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia. Not Indonesia, this trip, but I have told her some of my Bali stories to get her excited. I’m going to miss her a lot, as we have a nice rhythm working in the house together. She designs; I write.

I wish I were going, too. It’s only three months since my partner and I got back from a 10-week tour of Europe, so I really can’t complain, but I long to have that experience again: of new sensations, fun, openness, discovery and even a little bit of anxiety. Being on edge. New tastes and smells. There’s no routine, and there’s often a culture shock element, and you’re out of your comfort zone. And that is so good for you.

Imagine if, as Janet did with Bali, my sister just decided to stay over there. We never know what’s around the corner. I’ve fallen in love with a place, too: Scotland. I could give many reasons but they wouldn’t fully explain to you why. I want to go and live there, for a while at least. There are many other places I could live: Budapest, Berlin, Brasov, Ubud (that’s just of places I’ve been to) but the pull for now is for sparse moors, deep lochs, castles and whisky.

This was supposed to be a post about a launch, and it’s become a ramble, because today is a little hard. A little sad. Sometimes I just think about how strange it is that we naturally put ourselves in positions where we miss people. It’s necessary, to be whole. Moving away from our parents, living where we like or where we need to be, going overseas. One relationship of mine cracked because of my burning desire to move to Melbourne. I’m glad it did, now. But isn’t it strange how many of us seek new places? We want to learn about how others live but we also want to find out who we are in these places that – often for an unknown reason – we’re drawn to. My grandparents came from Norway and from Holland. They travelled all the way to a strange land to make a new life. And then, of course, there are people who move or are moved by force. One person I met at Ubud, Mo Tejani, is a Ugandan refugee who was at first forced to move, and later decided to make the world his home.

Since I was a child I’ve dreamt of a (moveable) house containing all the people I love and admire.

More delicious Balinese food

When I think about Janet, this is exactly what she has created. Her festival. It’s where the people she loves and admires congregate, to talk about meaningful things and also to play (the parties at UWRF are the best). The writers are from all over the world. And the festival is moveable. There was a small part of it in Melbourne last night. Many of the attendees travel together around Indonesia. Alumni run into each other at other writers’ festivals in Perth, Byron Bay, Sydney and in Singapore and India. Janet is often there. She brings her family with her.

Perhaps my sister and I, and all of you, can meet up in Ubud.

The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps by Eric Hazan reviewed for Bookslut

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My review of Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (translated by David Fernbach) can be found in the July issue of Bookslut. I completed the review while in Paris a few weeks ago. It begins:

‘I’m sitting in an apartment in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris, and because I’ve finished Eric Hazan’s detailed, passionate The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps I can place myself not just topographically, but temporally, in this city. I know that the lines of some of the nearby streets have not changed since the Middle Ages, that in this area were, in Hazan’s words, “cabinetmakers, carvers, gilders, polishers and turners.” There was also a royal manufactory of wallpaper, and when wages were reduced in April 1789 there was an uprising. Troops intervened, several people died, and the incident is seen as a “prelude to the revolution.”

Any visit to this city would be made richer by taking the time to read Hazan’s book. He looks at Paris through a few specific lenses: section by section through the quarters of old Paris, the faubourgs, and then the villages of new Paris; and then (still both topographically and temporally) through “Red Paris,” through the eyes of flâneurs, and through the visual image.’

You can read the rest here.

Shakespeare and Co., Paris

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Despite seeing Notre Dame, the Panthéon and the Conciergerie today, and unexpectedly falling in love with stone, spiral staircases, there was another highlight I thought you’d appreciate: visiting one of the world’s most famous and truly delightful bookstores, Shakespeare and Company. The shelves are crammed with old and new books, the staff (I heard only Australian and American English) climb on actual wooden ladders to get to high places, and upstairs is a library and that famous bed. There were no photos allowed up there.

Above: G perusing the film books.

Okay, here’s one chimera (not a gargoyle) from the Notre Dame, because they are incredible:

And it was great seeing the Notre Dame right after paying our respects to Victor Hugo. Did you know much of the restoration in the 19th Century took place because he called attention to it?

At S&C I bought Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and a great illustrated bag.