Jess Hill - "Losing It: Can We Stop Violence against Women and Children?" (Quarterly Essay 97)

Thoughts while reading this:

• Hill is strong on not focusing only on 'gendered drivers' (in the language of the National Plan) vs other more proximate factors like the impact of child maltreatment and trauma, mental health disorders, alcohol and gambling, and upfront about the historical context behind the hard-won focus on primary prevention and a feminist perspective. At times it feels like it's getting a bit close to a straw person but her argument is that the balance is wrong - and, implicitly, that it has suited governments to maintain this since it was put in place in the first overdue wave of reform from 2008 onwards.
• A lot on child and adolescent sexual violence and abuse - within intimate partner relationships, directed towards siblings and caregivers, and in other contexts. Evidenced by ACMS and otherwise.
• Rates of domestic, family and sexual violence not falling. Hill questions the dominant view that this is being driven by increased reporting. Another question that comes up: could this be driven by the social and technological trends that she points out elsewhere (alienation of boys, access to harmful material online, manosphere), ie a current going against whatever positive effect primary prevention and early intervention efforts are having?

See What You Made Me Do remains one of the most stunning non-fiction books I've ever read. And for all the contention around the bomb that Hill threw last year with her public criticisms of Australia's approach on primary prevention it's hard to see her as anything other than an enormous force for good on this topic.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

I liked the more off-the-wall visuals, the little horror elements, and Benedict Cumberbatch but as a movie this is a bit of a mess, and noticeably not at all stand-alone from the 'MCU'.

Esther Rose - Want

Want is a sweetheart of an album, carrying a good part of the charm that made How Many Times in particular such a winner (especially on early highlight "Had To" with its tuneful verse/chorus, surprising bridge and rapidly climbing guitar solo) and adding rockier, noisier elements that produce some of its best moments in songs like "Ketamine", "Rescue You", "New Bad" and "The Clown". There's something endearingly slightly unpolished about the whole affair - it feels easy to imagine these as a set of songs written by someone you might know ... which is in the record's favour, not to its detriment.

Andor seasons 1 & 2 / Rogue One

Andor lived up to the reviews - staying focused the whole way through on the perils and costs of resistance in the face of tyranny, spies and soldiers, with a grittiness and grasp of the dramatic that make the action-y sequences to which it periodically builds up almost a surprise and the more exciting for it, without becoming the point. 

Star Wars has never been personally important to me, but I only needed the general cultural awareness of it that we all have to fill in the blanks with Andor. And, of course, I've seen Rogue One before; on this rewatch, post-series, it naturally gains resonance from knowing Cassian's back story and indeed the whole back story of the rebellion leading up to the movie's events, but also suffers by comparison to the longer-form story-telling that's retrospectively proceeded the events that it depicts itself (Jyn's rise to heroism feels abrupt when compared to the Cassian's tortuous road).

Geelong Art Gallery

The John Norman Mann Bequest

A bequest directed to contemporary art, with a particular focus on First Nations practices and works by non-Indigenous artists inspired by the natural world. Some real highlights across these rooms.

Below: Judy Watson - "standing stone, kangaroo grass, bush string" (2020) & Angelina Ngal - "Bush plum Dreaming" (2010)

Also (possibly from the general permanent collection, I'm not sure): Cricket Saleh - "This too shall pass" (2018):

"Yvonne Audette - Observation and Experience"

"Moving squares" (1959)

"Modern Lives - Prints by Australian Women Artists 1900s-1950s"

Ethleen Palmer - "Honeyeater" (1935)

Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai

This really is an unusual, and unusually good, novel. Everyone in it feels like a character in a book - Ludo and Sibylla most of all - but The Last Samurai as a whole feels somehow true, in a way that doesn't require the reader to fully agree with what it's saying about the potential for human learning and development in a society less bounded that ours (which I'm not sure I do), while bringing to life both the ideas and the characters who populate its story. 

The humour is welcome and often unexpected, the pathos likewise - and the way those two are sometimes combined. The fizzing formal shifts and interventions - capital letter toddler-speak interruptions, intermittent streams of consciousness, extended excursions into language pedagogy across multiple languages - feel apt and not overly determined. It's like DeWitt has written something that's more or less a conventional novel but just molded in ways that make it actually very unconventional, and very enjoyable and thought-provoking. Whether it will linger in a more profound way, emotionally or otherwise, I'm not sure - but reading it was a different experience and a fluent one, which itself is pretty rare.

On at the Counihan Gallery

Three installations each by Australia-based artists with Asian cultural heritages who identify as queer. 

From "Fairy Tales from the Celestial Garden" - Jayanto Tan

From "Put Your Head on my Shoulder" - Andrew Chan

Also: "Yellow Paint" - Mark du Poitiers

MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

This is great! It comes in a package that maybe lends itself to being dismissed - another guy wielding an electric guitar, indie folk rock styles, and a wry, nasally dry singing-songwriting voice. But all the songs are good, the electric guitar is good, there are surprises, and in moments it reaches something even better.

"David EOY 2024"

Mostly breezily indie-sounding pop and crunchy guitars, plus quirks. My favourites - "Rip Off" (Momma), "Cheapskate" (Dune Rats), "Oysters in my Pocket" (Royel Otis), "Like I Say (I runaway)" (Nilüfer Yanya), "May Ninth" (Khruangbin).

Rebecca Solnit - Recollections of My Non-Existence

I suppose by definition any memoir by Rebecca Solnit would be Solnit-esque. What that means in Recollections of My Non-Existence - which I of course enjoyed very much - is that we get the personal perspective combined with the philosophical and social concerns that animate all of the writing ... but somehow without a great deal of psychological interiority. Which is not exactly a criticism in this case but more a feature. I do think that much of the pleasure I got from this one was possible because I'm already in some deep with her writing and work.

Encanto

High quality, with a lot of that due to the songs - music and lyrics - which add depth.

Station Eleven

Impressive how much this series is infused with the same mood as the book, while genuinely adapting (not just transposing) it for the tv format with some significant departures from the source that have the effect of putting the two - book and show - in a conversation that results in a new whole. Station Eleven the book clearly tapped into something, and so too the show - something mythic.

Rebel Ridge

 Tight modern Western.

Queensland Art Gallery

On was the 11th annual Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; I was pretty piecemeal in how I took it in given this was a bit of a snatched visit, but I liked Katsuko Ishigaki's Okinawa paintings with their US military bases, vivid blurriness and willingness to highlight the elements of their own inner composition, and Mit Jai Inn's installations which made good use of the central hall.

"View of Henoko-Oura Bay from Sedake Hill" (2023-24)

Also "Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography" which was smallish and overall not as engaging as its theme seemed likely to be, but it did remind me that Bill Henson's work, for all its over familiarity and the overly familiar discourse about its subjects and surfaces (admittedly a discourse that does continue to become more complex over time), really does have a whoosh to it - a reminder I get nearly every time I see any of it.

"Untitled #76" (1985-86)

Marisha Pessl - Darkly

The concept is fun, the execution solid enough without rising to any great heights.

"Yayoi Kusama" (NGV International)

In a way Yayoi Kusama has crept up on me over the years. I've liked her quite a lot for a long time now, including some memorable encounters - the pumpkins on Naoshima, the illuminated ladder to infinity at the NGV (and in Our Magic Hour) - but I don't think I've ever really focused on her art as a body of work. I suspect a large part of that's been because both the surfaces of the art (the dots!) and the persona of the artist loom so large, making it difficult to properly see the works themselves, in their own right and as a whole.

Things I was struck by in this large survey:

• The correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe
• The obsessive, repetitive work from early on
• The dots also being from early on
• The pumpkins, in a good way
• 'Self-obliteration'
• The darkened celestial mirror rooms have maybe always been my favourites, eg "Chandelier of Grief" (2016) below

(w/ Jade)

"Current: Brian Robinson" & Sculpture Park, McClelland Gallery

Been a while since I made it out here and this visit was mostly for the sculpture park. Those that most stood out tended to be the most monumental, and a couple for their whimsy. I might be wrong but my impression is that the artists represented in the park are notably un-diverse, seeming to lean heavily towards older white men.

Dean Collis - "Rex Australis: The king is dead, long live the king", 2012

Andrew Rogers - "The winding path, the search for truth", 2010 and (in background) "Gaia", 2014

Sebastian di Mauro - "Snuffle", 2002-03

Peter Blizzard - "Halo moon shrine", 2005

Roman Liebach - "Wharf spears", 2005

John Kelly - "Alien", 2006

R. F. Kuang - Babel

At the very least, Babel is interesting in multiple ways - an undisguised and undisguisedly angry polemic on the harms of colonialism wrapped up with an interrogation of the role of language and translation in empire and cross-border understanding, and of strategies of social change (including the necessity or otherwise of violence, and the toll that it takes), and delivered through a mostly pretty gripping alternative-historical fantasy story. 

It's repetitive, didactic, heavy-handed and more - yet these scan more as texture than as flaws, part and parcel of the particular thing that Babel is, and even admirable as indications of the novel's willingness to depart from some conventional markers of literary quality and tastefulness. There's not a lot else like it that I've read.

Gladiator II

In the shadow of the original, almost by design. 

Mission: Impossible 1-8

I've watched all of these before except #3; taken as a whole they sure are entertaining. 

Moana 2

The first one is my favourite of the Disney animations I've seen - relatively unproblematic (a low bar) with an engaging lead character (relatedly) and good music. The sequel is just fine, nothing more, and mainly because of the built-up goodwill from the first. I would've liked to've seen more of Matangi who actually seemed like a character, as well as having the best song.

(w/ R, L, J & H)

"An Insatiable Appetite for Pictorial Adventure: William Blamire Young" & "five letters cinque lettere: Filomena Coppola" (Mildura Arts Centre)

Supposedly Blamire Young is known as the master of Australian watercolour but I didn't get much from him. I could see the technical proficiency but some of his work seemed almost to be trying to create oil painting-like effects, to which I basically felt, what was the point.

I liked the Coppola exhibition, which was about the experiences of post WWII Italian migrants to the Sunraysia region, its title and theme coming from the five letters of the English alphabet that aren't in the Italian alphabet: j, k, w, x and y.

2024: "Like it's some kind of excuse"

1. Rewind - Rosali
Bite Down (Merge, 2024)

2. White Lies, White Jesus and You - Katie Pruitt
Mantras (Rounder, 2024)

3. Fish - Angie McMahon
Light, Dark, Light Again (Gracie Music, 2023)

4. I'm Not Crying, You're Crying - English Teacher
This Could Be Texas (Island, 2024)

5. It Was Coming All Along - Maggie Rogers
Don't Forget Me (Debay Sounds / Capitol, 2024)

6. The Hurtin' Kind - Orville Peck (feat. Midland)
Stampede (Warner, 2024)

7. Clams Casino - Cassandra Jenkins
My Light, My Destroyer (Dead Oceans, 2024)

8. Empires Never Know - Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer, 2024)

9. Floating on a Moment - Beth Gibbons
Lives Outgrown (Domino, 2024)

10. Good Luck, Babe! - Chappell Roan
single (Island, 2024)

11. North Country - Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Woodland (Acony, 2024)

12. Run - Miranda Lambert
Postcards from Texas (Republic / Big Loud, 2024)

13. Right Back to It - Waxahatchee (feat. MJ Lenderman)
Tigers Blood (Anti-, 2024)

A lot of great songs this year, though no albums that I really took to heart - closest was Lives Outgrown. "It Was Coming All Along" is a pretty perfect rock-pop song that calls back to the late 90s / early 2000s golden age for that genre; "Fish" runs deep and for me is thoroughly associated with a certain stream of Australian music / lit / experience that includes the likes of Holly Throsby and Jennifer Down. Katie Pruitt was back with another crisply longing collection and Cassandra Jenkins with a rockier, catchier one; I continue to mostly only like rather than love Waxahatchee's take on Americana but "Right Back to It" kept on calling to me across the year. 

(on spotify)

Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven

I suppose all novels about the end of the world are also about something else; what makes Station Eleven different is that, if anything, it's more about that other stuff - the meanings and relationships of art, society, family (birth types and otherwise) and selfhood - while also being about the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. It's so well written, sentences, scenes and structure. This is the second time I've read it (first time here) and having since read Sea of Tranquility it's clear the two are of a piece.

Lev Grossman - The Bright Sword

The other knights came to life for me just as much as Collum despite having much less page time - Bedivere, Dinadan, Palomides, to a lesser extent Dagonet and Constantine. And the others, who get no or only limited point of view sections - Nimue, Guinevere and Arthur (Morgan and Lancelot less so). Just as importantly, The Bright Sword's Britain comes to life too - its conflicts, tribes, histories and magics. I guess there aren't many stories (or sets of stories) that lend themselves as readily to retelling and reimagining as King Arthur's - I wonder why that is? Grossman's version works.

Jennifer Down - Bodies of Light

There's something convincing about Jennifer Down's writing - across the many of her short stories that I've read (and which might be her strongest form, or at least my favourite of hers), that lovely debut novel Our Magic Hour and now Bodies of Light. I don't know exactly how she achieves it, but everything she writes feels like it comes from a place of knowing - not direct lived experience necessarily, but a meaningful emotional or psychological understanding nonetheless. 

Completely unshowy but with a style that's recognisable (at the level of both sentences and set pieces and motifs), Down is a wonderful writer - which is just as well given the heaviness of her subject here, and how many ways a novel like this could have gone wrong (but Bodies of Light never does) in depicting the sheer level of trauma experienced by its central character and its lifelong effects. I read the first few pages on a train and found it so affecting that I nearly had to stop reading - and it doesn't let up from there. 

It's not trauma porn, and neither does it descend into anything adjacent to inspiration porn; Maggie / Josie / Holly is rendered with empathy and complexity and the structural forces shaping her life - the broken 'care' system for children, the institutions and cultures that enable abuses of power and sexual violence, the damage done by misogynistic mindsets and beliefs about women and mothers - laid out with righteous anger. The whole novel is brutal, intimate, compelling, moving. 

The Fall Guy

The unquestionable charisma of Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt (the latter a touch dimmed compared to usual) can only take you so far. The Fall Guy doesn't take itself too seriously, it's got some fun actors in secondary roles, and it's self aware - although not with any particular coherence - but it's not as fun as it should be.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

I'd had the impression this was quite well reviewed, but if that's true, expectations must have been very low. Although, thinking about it, it's hard to say how the movie could've been actually good - what tone that would have required, if nothing else.

In The Loop

Holds up over time I reckon.

(previously)

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

This movie certainly has a vibe.

Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake

There was a moment while reading Creation Lake where I felt that hard-to-describe feeling in my stomach that only comes when reading something especially enjoyable and interesting at the same time - almost always literary fiction, which is less about any intrinsic hierarchy of worth and more about its nature as a genre. The feeling or sensation is hard to describe, but it's a bit stirred-up, a bit excited, a feeling of pleasure. 

Neither the spy plot nor the big ideas about humanity and civilisation felt out of balance - that they're woven so well together has a fair bit to do with the novel's voice, Sadie Smith's harsh judgements and decisive observations rubbing up interestingly with the occasional hints of a less self-contained inner self, and the way that Bruno's emails and the rural French setting eventually leave her unmoored.

In the end I felt this was more 'very good' than towards 'great' - but books as simultaneously grippingly readable and intellectually substantial (not to mention, enjoyable) as this one don't come along that often.

Tom Greenwell & Chris Bonnor - Waiting for Gonski: How Australia Failed its Schools

Things that this book reminded me about:

• What makes Australia extraordinary, and not in a good way, isn't the extremely high rate of public funding to private schools per se, but the lack of any reciprocal public obligations accepted by those schools as a result
• The achievement / outcomes gap between public and private schools is almost entirely attributable to peer effects
• The immense power of the vested interests of the status quo - combined with the huge blind spots that many carry about the influence of privilege - has done huge harm to attempts to enact evidence-based reform post (and for the matter pre-) the first Gonski report
• What a difference genuinely needs-based funding would make across the whole education system
• The social justice imperative of focusing on school funding and school education policy more broadly.

Lucas Mann - Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances

I found it a tiny bit annoying at times, but overall I appreciated this book. And I couldn't swear that the moments where I found it grating didn't reflect more on me than it.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings - Woodland

Warmly welcoming, Woodland is my favourite Gillian Welch album since the flurry of those first four classics Revival, Hell Among the Yearlings, Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey ... the long gaps between records since then - from Soul Journey (2003) to The Harrow & The Harvest (2011) and then All the Good Times (2020), with Woodland coming relatively quickly now - have added to the sense that the music Welch (and Rawlings) makes is somehow timeless, almost as if she's the vessel or the channel rather than an active creator, an impression that of course does her a huge disservice while also speaking to the quality of the music itself. 

This one's got a bit more texture to it compared to most - more instrumentation, and as a result a touch more production - but it has the same air as all of her others as having always already been there yet arriving fully present in the now. It really sings.

Kelly Link - Magic for Beginners

So, so good. All of these stories are interesting and most of them have something more than that - a particular intrigue. Particular stand outs: the title story (I've read it before), "Stone Animals", "Some Zombie Contingency Plans", "Lull", as much for their feel and the way they linger as for anything else. It's trite but there really is something of the magician to Link.

"Magritte" (Art Gallery of NSW)

Dream-like has always been the first way to describe Magritte's work, and maybe it remains the best. He's certainly among the oldest of my old favourites, and if the jolt of his art has been dulled a bit by familiarity, time and changes in my own sensibilities, it still holds plenty of charge regardless.

"La condition humaine", 1933

"L'empire des lumières", 1954

"L'enfance d'Icare", 1960

Nobody Wants This season 1

It's charming and peppy; kind of silly but not one-dimensional. Honestly, it's mostly Kristen Bell's presence that sold it for me.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Interesting and sympathetic depiction of 'radical' eco-activism, structured as a procedural action-drama.

Slow Horses season 4

Still good in all the same ways, and manages to delve into back stories and personal lives in a way that doesn't detract and even adds to the intrigue.

Miranda Lambert - Postcards from Texas

First few listens, I had Postcards from Texas clocked as median Miranda Lambert - nice but overly familiar, the sound a return to the polished sheen she settled into a few records back, the tempo mostly mid-, the melodies much like others she's offered before (tracks 2-4: "Dammit Randy" the type of ballad she does well but she's done it before (it plays as a less soaring, 15-years-on "Love Song"), "Looking Back on Luckenbach" the type of song that everyone's done before, "Santa Fe" having almost exactly the same verse as Pistol Annies' "Best Years of My Life" but far less dynamic). 

It gets better with repeated plays though - she's such a strong songwriter and singer that the songs come through more in their own right even when their packaging isn't at first particularly distinctive. And even though they're not all-timers amidst her excellent back catalogue, numbers like "Armadillo", "Dammit Randy", "January Heart", "Run" and "Alimony" have more than a sprinkling of what it is that's made Lambert such a stand-out across her career as a whole.

Trap

Fine as a diversion.

The Wild Robot

The director describes this film in terms of Monet meeting Miyazaki and well it's not that. However, it is well done - the story's moving, the action and details maintain interest, and the animation does have some lovely moments.

(w/ L)

The Great seasons 1 & 2

For a show with such a distinct vibe, it's surprisingly difficult to pin down exactly what it is about The Great that makes it so enjoyable. It's something about the way its over the top absurdity coexists with such recognisable (if often base) impulses and motivations, along with the tart humour it finds at every turn. 

All the characters are grotesque with the partial exception of Catherine herself - although, particularly in this second season, the show suggests that her extraordinary will and her determination to impose it on Russia itself has a monstrous element - yet still on some level relatable, and season 2 successfully develops most of its main characters and relationships to make them sympathetic. Plus there are some fun additions, in their own right, for how they illuminate the main players' motivations, and as pot stirrers - particularly the Swedish monarchs and Catherine's mother. Aunt Elizabeth remains maybe the one genuinely somewhat heroic figure.

(season 1 previously)

Orville Peck - Stampede

There's a lot of fun to be had across this hugely enjoyable country record, entirely made up of duets (or, in some cases, larger-group confabs) that are either covers or co-writes. Peck proves a versatile collaborator and singer, with a diverse array of styles on display and the voices and sounds of the 'guest' artists tending to be dominant, while Peck offers a level of croon that ranges from 'full Roy Orbison' to 'barely at all' from song to song. 

One of Stampede's pleasures is the many ways in which it's queer, along with its traditional-ish country sounds, and that's upfront with the first song, "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other" - with no less than Willie Nelson - which is as tuneful as it is tongue in cheek. In different ways, a particularly macho take on "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" with Sir Elton himself (one of the album's weaker moments as it happens), the energised Kylie duet "Midnight Ride", a team-up with Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway on "Papa Was a Rodeo" (which was always already a country song) and no doubt others.

There's a whole heap of songs that stand out for one reason or another - more that do than don't - although I feel like Peck, or his record label, knew what a rouser he had on his hands with his Travelling Wilburys-ish take on "Rhinestone Cowboy" judging by its placement as the closer. The ones with Margo Price and Mickey Guyton (both great, especially the one with Price) both would've sounded perfectly at home on their own albums, the one with Nathaniel Rateliff sounds a lot like Bruce Springsteen, the one with Allison Russell sounds like an Allison Russell song but with a different type of edge, the one with Teddy Swims is soulful-as. And I haven't even mentioned "The Hurtin' Kind", with Midland, possibly my favourite of the lot.

Looking at Art with Alex Katz

This book has been on my bedside table for months - over a year probably - and I've dipped into it regularly, for the bursts of great art yes, and even more so for Katz's short, opinionated, craft-driven words about it. Whether or not I agree, or even have any kind of technical frame of reference for understanding what he says, each precis (or digression) illuminates not only the piece - and the artist - in question but also, as the title promises, ways of looking at art in general.

"Sci-Fi: Mythologies Transformed" (Science Gallery Melbourne)

Asian, First Nations, women's and queer intersections with and re-visionings of science fiction.

(w/ Jade)

Beachwood Sparks - Across the River of Stars

Nice enough but kind of bland.

Helen Oyeyemi - Parasol Against the Axe

Parasol Against the Axe is a puzzling, deliberately disjointed book that demands close reading to make sense of it on any level - including the most basic, to grasp the action of what is happening, never mind the deeper, nested dimensions of what it's about. So was it worth the effort? I'm not entirely sure, but reading it was never less than pleasurable, its voice isn't quite like any I've encountered before, and both the stories it tells and what passes for its central characters - Hero Tojosoa, Dorothea Gilmartin, and the city of Prague and its various avatars - are distinctive and sharply sidelong.

Rosali - Bite Down

Pretty nice and in many ways a bit of a throwback to various early 2000s indie-folk/country acts - at different points reminding me of the Dearhunters, the Last Town Chorus, that almost randomly acquired 'Between the Lines' compilation and (more recently) Nadia Reid. First two songs "On Tonight" and "Rewind" are especially immediate, and strong.

Lucy Crehan - Cleverlands

At this point it feels safe to say that education is an enduring interest.

(previous read)

House of the Dragon seasons 1 & 2

This show is entirely watchable, and works in a mode of modern fantasy in many ways first defined by the ASOIAF books - political, military and individual machinations with realpolitik and power at their centre, and magic woven into the backdrop rather than foregrounded. Even here, while dragons are depicted as both source and symbol of magic in this 200 years prior to Game of Thrones Westeros, they're primarily treated as being like any other resource and source of power, albeit an overpowered one (to me they don't really register as characters in their own right).

There's an article that diagnoses the problem with the later seasons of Game of Thrones as being that the show's storytelling shifted from being primarily sociological to primarily psychological; House of the Dragon is probably more evenly balanced across its first two seasons. I'm not sure if that's related to how slowly its events move, building up towards fullscale war rather than focusing mostly on the battles themselves. There's still some intrigue in where it's going, although probably more so in how it gets there, and to a lesser extent what it has to say about power and society, and individual choice.

(previously, season 1)

Johnny Blue Skies (Sturgill Simpson) - Passage du Desir

So relaxed-feeling and at home in its own country music skin that you could almost miss how well put together these songs are. They slip by easily, but they've got a heft that keeps them away 'easy listening'.

Deb Olin Unferth - Wait Till You See Me Dance

I don't know to what extent she was a trailblazer and influence on others vs being simply one among a loose group of other in similar vein, but the problem with this collection (which I'd been keen to track down on the strength of the title story) is that the stories in it too exactly exemplify a strain of lit fic that was very present about 10 to 15 or 20 years ago without being distinctive among them in any particular way. So it's kind of over familiar and kind of dull even though a number of them are actually of some quality.

Kelly Link - Stranger Things Happen

Kelly Link's stories nearly always make you want to work out what's happened in them, which doesn't tend to be straightforward even on the level of basic plot and action. More often than not that's accompanied by a sense that even once the puzzle of the action of the story has been solved (more or less), there's another layer to what's going on in them - so that what they're really 'about' has multiple oblique, interlinked layers.  

This was her first collection and the first I read, a while back. I appreciated it more this time, having better learned how to read her since. Interesting also to see some recurring motifs and patterns, some still reappearing in her most recent stories.

"The Girl Detective" stood out and I found myself wondering about its emotional core (I haven't verified this but my sense is that each of her stories has one). Is is that the girl detective is looking for her mother? Or is it that the narrator is looking for that which the girl detective is (which includes, without only being, the person who is always looking for their mother)? Or something else altogether?

Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer

It's a delightful surprise that My Light, My Destroyer is so marvellous - cosmic, electronically-inflected rock/pop/etc that doesn't shy away from either a clear hook or an ambient interlude. "Hard Drive" was magical but of the kind that felt like a one-off; it turns out that Jenkins has plenty more up her sleeve. This whole album feels like a dream, or maybe more accurately like everyday life wrapped in something dream-like.

(An Overview on Phenomenal Nature)

Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven

Great fun - by turns blaring, shouty, fuzzy and melodic (and sometimes all of those at once).

Kelly Link - White Cat, Black Dog

Kelly Link has got her claws into me now. These wily, elegant stories always play fair but are never predictable. In them, one thing happens after another, each sentence says what it means, yet what it all means is puzzling unless you really pay attention and make an effort to put it all together afterwards. Each one takes a fairy tale as its starting point and the familiarity of the stories embedded in the source tales - whether or not one is familiar with the specific fairy tale itself - contributes to the uncanny, slipping feel of Link's takes on them, something that's probably true of all her fiction but in particular relief given the overt links to those foundational folk stories and narratives of the ones in White Cat, Black Dog. Most notable for me are "Prince Hat Underground" (the second time recently I've run into 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon') and "Skinder's Veil", both particularly multi-layered, and the relatively more straightforward "The White Road" and "The Game of Smash and Recovery".

Camera Obscura - Look to the East, Look to the West

It's like they never went away.