Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Zadie Smith wrote somewhere that with a lot of novels, the first few pages or so, maybe the first chapter, is kind of fussed over by the author, as s/he tries to find the shape of what the book is going to be, a quality that may be just as much further reinforced as smoothed out in the editing and rewriting process. It kind of felt like there was a bit of that with the first chapter of Fates and Furies, which sets up a deliberately self-conscious depiction of Lotto and Mathilde, young, beautiful and in love, on a beach, married in secret just that morning; I remember reading the first few pages in Readings a couple of years ago and being struck by the visuals and the language but not being especially tempted to keep reading. And, if anything, that impression was reinforced once the novel started really pulling - and I began really feeling it - from the second chapter, which races at just the right pace through Lotto's childhood, charmed and at the same time marked by trauma and loss, and then into the third with its succession of parties pulling still further forward through time (then chapter four: same trick, with the plays), and by then I was convinced.

But the trick - and it's not a cheap one, but rather one of real literary art - is the way that the building succession of events and perspectives continually sheds retrospective light on the earlier sections, about the central marriage and the layers to both the people in it, and many of those around them. It's there writ large in the two main sections, 'Fates' and 'Furies', and in so many smaller ways (it's not actually a small thing, but in a less good novel it could have been overlooked: I was very glad when the book returned to Gwennie and gave us her perspective near the end - retrospectively validating the Lotto-centric narrative speed with which she was disposed of, off-stage no less, in the earlier section). And it's also not overly cute in how it lays out those perspectives and voices; it matters, for example, that we see some of 'Fates' from Mathilde's - and others' - perspectives, rather than being locked entirely into the narrative that's been written for Lotto, so that the transition isn't any kind of cheap 'twist'.

It's funny. Many of the books I most admire, and which most speak to me, are those that stick fiercely to the interiority of the main character, often in first person: I've followed Murakami, Siri Hustvedt, Scarlett Thomas, Rivka Galchen, Rebecca Lee (collectively, most of my current favourites) far down those roads. But some of those that have most moved me are deliberately staged with a multitude of voices, giving the reader direct access to the inner lives of even some of the more minor characters. (Here, some of the characters, like Antoinette and Sallie, could so easily have existed only in relation to Lotto in particular, but Groff insists upon their personhood.)

I did feel that the tautness of the novel was lost a bit in the 'Furies' section. It gets a bit choppy at times, without that same sense of there being a thread tugging ever forward (of story) that marks 'Fates'. I expect that to some extent that's deliberate (since part of the point is that Mathilde's story is much more discontinuous and less apparently fated than Lotto's) and partly flows from Groff's determined avoidance of some of the simpler, more black and white choices she could have made in depicting Mathilde's choices and what they've meant for her happiness, but still, some of the air went out of the sails for me over the back end. Nonetheless, this is a quite wonderful novel, which has touched me while making me think about how we come to be who we are, and live the lives we do.

(I came to it after reading Groff's wonderful story "Ghosts and Empties" in a New Yorker back issue.)

2017 cd: "Turn it into something new"

The usual end of year mix cd:

1. Burn The Witch - Radiohead 
A Moon Shaped Pool (XL, 2016)
So I caught up with The King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool at the start of the year and it turns out Radiohead still have plenty to say to me. This song sounds, as Yorke sings, like a low flying panic attack.

2. Do You Need My Love - Weyes Blood
Front Row Seat To Earth (Kemado, 2016)
What an epic. The album is full of these, dramatically, sweepingly on the verge but never quite tipping into being too much.

3. Heartache Is An Uphill Climb - Tift Merritt
Stitch of the World (Yep Roc, 2017)
Merritt has been great for ages, and Stitch of the World might be her best yet. In some ways this song is pretty straight-up, but I can never resist this kind of flowing, rootsily golden thing when it’s done as well as it is here.

4. Bad Reputation - Haley Bonar
Last War (Memphis, 2014)
Speaking of things I have a weakness for, hello more brightly sulky and 90s alt-y sounding pop from the excellent Haley Bonar.

5. Sweet By And By - Miranda Lambert
Southern Family (Elektra, 2016)
This winsome, sweetly lilting track on someone else’s project got me paying attention to Lambert again …

6. Runnin’ Just In Case - Miranda Lambert
The Weight of These Wings (RCA, 2016)
… which led me to this super-impressive double album, 24 richly emotional but very rarely sentimental songs which pretty much all land right in the sweet spot. “Runnin’ Just In Case” is the first track and it sets the tone.

7. The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness - The National
Sleep Well Beast (4AD, 2017)
The National, so reliably great.

8. Don’t Pass Me By - Laura Marling
Semper Femina (More Alarming, 2017)
This has been one of the really big ones for me this year (along with the Tift Merritt and Miranda Lambert records); on it, Marling taps something very spectral, very human, and never more than on “Don’t Pass Me By”. A special song, delicate and powerful.

9. Finish What We Started - Jessie Ware
Glasshouse (Island, 2017)
This latest smoothly heartstruck record from Ware is her third wonderful soulful modern pop album in a row, and the thing about “Finish What We Started”, the thing is that it soars.

10. Over Everything - Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile
Lotta Sea Lice (Matador, 2017)
Delightful throwback rock-y songwriter collab. First heard during a cheeky ‘writing’ session at the Grace Darling one sunny weekday afternoon — it turns out, the perfect circumstances for it.

11. Mountain - Holly Throsby
After A Time (Spunk, 2017)
This is the second time that I’ve been ambushed by one of Throsby’s melancholy Australian-summer tunes at the end of a year. The last time was in 2011; some things have changed since then, some things have stayed the same.

12. Strangest Thing - The War On Drugs
A Deeper Understanding (Atlantic, 2017)
Arriving with immaculate timing the day before I set off for Zanzibar and beyond, the wide open roads sounds of this one have soundtracked this trip so far — especially “Strangest Thing” in all its expansiveness.

***

And the ones that I nearly included, but in the end didn't: Jen Cloher, The xx, Spoon, Aimee Mann - four excellent albums by existing favourites of mine, all of which I listened to more than at least some of those that actually made it onto the final mix, but there you go.

[edited 31/1/18 with a track order tweak]

Wakefield

A riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic metaphysical short story via a latter day rewrite by E L Doctorow, told from the perspective of the husband who disappears. Had some interesting angles, and making him as unsympathetic as he is (very, for the most part) worked well and in a feminist fashion. But it kind of dragged as it went on, the close-mic noirish narration starting to grate, the internal journey he goes through not entirely convincing or satisfying, even though Bryan Cranston seems well into it.

(plane viewing #4)

The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

I started listening to this in earnest on the skybus on the way to the airport and it's been my main soundtrack since, in airports, on planes (thank you noise-cancelling earphones) and here in Zanzibar, including often on the starry beach at night - all of which is very apt, as maybe even more than Lost in the Dream this is music for expanses and journeys and the figurative wide open road.

Sure, at times it can begin to sound just a tiny bit formulaic - yearning verses, windswept atmospherics (at times there's a hint of the Church there), epic electric guitar, probably some 'woahs' or 'yeahs' in the back end - but it stands up to repeated listening and besides who cares when the lane they've found for themselves is so great. "Strangest Thing" is the one that I get stuck on, the whole sweep of it undeniable, and then there's the little details like the repeated single pinprick pulse that makes me think of lights dotting landscapes moving far away. But the three songs that come before it (and open the record), "Up All Night", "Pain" and "Holding On" are basically just as good, and so is the emphatic rock and roll of "In Chains" a bit later.

All in all, the right kind of record not only for travel, but for ringing out a year - what luck for me to have come to it at just the right time.

Atomic Blonde

Super fun! Electric and instantly iconic. Charlize Theron has definitely got something. Great period soundtrack too (1989 and thereabouts).

(plane viewing #3)

North by Northwest

Filling one of my many Hitchcockian gaps. I don't think I could quite say that it didn't feel at all dated - but it did feel at once fast-paced and stylish, and I didn't feel much was lost in the translation from 1959 to today - except, maybe, in a certain suspension of disbelief required to accept Cary Grant's 50s-besuited and drolly dry advertising guy as the ladykiller that he is in the film. Also: the iconic Eva Marie Saint, and the iconic crop duster scene.

(plane viewing #2)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Well Luc Besson, he always goes for it, and often what he's going for - as here - is spectacular science fiction, and in this case actually based on a comic book, which I think works in its favour in giving it a readymade stock of visuals, characters (notably of course the wonderfully - and comic bookily named - galactic federal agents Valerian and Laureline, although, as interesting-looking and frequently charismatic as Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne both are, sparks don't exactly fly between them), species, settings and so on. It's fun the way Besson really commits to showing his outer space happenings, which always risks tipping into being a touch hokey but he pretty much pulls it off in Valerian, aided by a typically pacy plot.

(plane viewing #1)

Cesar Aira - The Literary Conference

A slim and no doubt deliberately puzzling little novella that appears to wear its literary and metaphorical conceits on its sleeve ...

In part due to the requisites of clarity (poetic fog horrifies me), and in part to my natural preference for an orderly exposition of the material, I deem it most appropriate to begin at the beginning. Not, however, at the beginning of this story but rather at the beginning of the previous one, the beginning that made it possible for there to be a story at all. Which in turn requires me to switch levels and begin with the Fable that provides the tale's logic.

... but proves considerably more slippingly elusive than it at first leads the reader to believe, from the Macuto Line to Mad Scientist introspection, engineered not-really wasps to cloned genius authors, lost love to a curious play emerging from the past, and finally the revelation that "colossal blue worms were slowly descending from the mountain peaks" ...

The solution is none other than the greatly overused (by me) "escape forward." Since turning back is off limits: Forward! To the bitter end! Running, flying, gliding, using up all the possibilities, the conquest of tranquility through the din of the battlefield. The vehicle is language. What else?

St Vincent - Masseduction

Well who knows what pop even means any more but, still, Masseduction has gotta have a claim to being the best pop record I've listened to this year. I liked her last one but this one is just super tight.

The immediate impression is more textural and hook-y, but with more listens the sharpness of the songs punches through - exhibit A being "Pills" and the way it gradually reveals itself as a complete epic, unspooling from the very Fear of Music-y opening through crunching guitar, an increasingly insistent baseline, an extended slowed-down outro and then, why not, some spacey saxophone to take us out. She's terrific when sketching out zig-zagging stretched-out melodies (e.g. "Hang on Me", "New York" - though that latter reminds me a touch of Regina Spektor, "Slow Disco"), terrific when putting her foot down and stomping (e.g. the title track, "Sugarboy"), and terrific when doing both at once (e.g. "Los Ageless", "Young Lover"). For all of its veers, this album feels kind of like a hug.

"Larissa Rogacheva - Nostalgic Grotesquery" (BSG)

Last week I wandered into the Brunswick Street Gallery as I do from time to time and was particularly drawn to Larissa Rogacheva's colourful and somewhat dream-like paintings (mostly watercolours). I suppose you just never know - while the general colour palette and mood are certainly well in my strike zone, overall I wouldn't have said it was especially the 'type' (or any of the types) of thing that I usually especially like. And yet I did especially like many of these, especially those with a mythological dimension, which included my two favourites, "The Fox" and "The Trojan dream #5" (alternately titled "Helen of Troy" on her website).

In fact, so much did I like them that I bought the Trojan dream to hang in my room. If anything, I thought "The Fox" was even better, but I suspect the Trojan - which also happens to be larger at a 60 cm diameter - will be a better choice for looking at day in, day out. Looking at it now (I picked it up today), I can more readily disentangle the entwined threads that drew me to it; in addition to the colours and general atmosphere of delicate dreaminess, there's a pop drift which is a touch Sandman-esque coexisting with a dash of the type of surrealism that takes its markers from de Chirico and his classical Greek and Italianate reference points (including, of course, the mythological), and put like that, there's little wonder it struck me so, taken, of course, with all of the work's own essential qualities in itself!

Samanth Subramanian - This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

A good complement to Running in the Family - in covering a completely different aspect of the country - and a top read in its own right in terms of educating me about Sri Lanka and setting the scene of its more recent history and social context.

Subramanian, a Tamil Indian, writes clearly, without taking sides (indeed, bringing out by showing rather than telling how futile, absurd and destructive has been the war between the two self-designated sides of the Sinhalese government and the LTTE), and with an impressive level of access to participants and those affected at seemingly all levels of Sri Lanka society - members of the army, former Tigers, their family members, members of parliament, Buddhist monks (including the first of them to go into parliament), the Muslim population (about 10 per cent of the country's population so not insignificant) and many others, most of whom come across as somewhat larger than life and certainly vividly.

What emerges is a portrait of the country today as fundamentally shaped by the long-running war, from 1983 when an LTTE ambush and killing of 13 soldiers triggered riots that killed probably thousands of Tamils and dislodged many more from their homes to the brutal ending in 2009 when the last of the LTTE fighters in the far north east were broken down amidst many thousands more Tamil civilians killed by one or both sides, as well as the unconscionable acts committed by both sides through those nearly 26 years. Subramanian's approach of facilitating the telling of stories or sharing of worldviews and ideologies (or, in some cases, both) by those he meets is effective and often powerful, and all told this struck me as a balanced and clear-sighted account of an incredibly harrowing and awful period and set of events, enormously increasing my understanding of it all.

"The Father" (MTC)

Powerful stuff.

Made me feel it from the perspective of both the elderly father (John Bell) who's suffering dementia and his adult sister (Anita Hegh) who has taken on the thankless work of caring for him. The subjective reality experienced by the father was done very well - it's difficult to stage the kind of slippages through time (ellipses, back and forths, repetitions), indistinguishable mixings of reality and fantasy, and identity confusions that afflict the father here, and that was done largely effectively here.

Reading a couple of the glowing reviews of the play from overseas makes me suspect that much of that is down to the play as written (Florian Zeller) and that this production might be more workmanlike than inspired - although Bell's turn is very real in the best way - but even still, it was well worthwhile.

(w/ Erandathie, Cass and Tamara (and Laura F's sis, Ness))

Feist @ the Forum, Friday 1 December

A very good show. Live, Feist is engaging and a strong and charismatic singer, her voice coming through with plenty of variety and dynamism and without shying away from the swoops, cracks and other quirks that litter her recordings of them. I liked that she obviously had a real relationship with each of her songs and enjoyed performing them, especially those from Pleasure, in a set that led off with, I reckon, a solid hour or so from that newest album - which made me feel I understood the record a lot better, in hearing the stripped-down rock and sometimes bluesy elements at the fore - before switching to a run of older songs, beginning with "My Moon My Man" (way more exciting live than on record) and taking in a healthy number from my personal favourite Metals, including "The Bad in Each Other".

(w/ Hayley, and also Jon + Sam)

(Let It Die, The Reminder, and oh look, I'd completely forgotten about seeing her live before albeit only through part of a festival set)

Cults - Offering

Haven't been able to make up my mind about this one. I've listened to it quite a bit - and sympathetically, given how much fun both their debut and Static were (especially that debut) - and it's pretty good and all. But it just hasn't seized me - I don't know why. The pop edge and inventiveness just seems a bit duller here, less vivid. So, pretty good, but oddly unmemorable.

Ali's Wedding

Surprising turn of events for me to have now seen not once, but twice, a film that I never sought out in the first place! Lucky it's so charming and easy to watch then.

(w/ Kevin)

Holly Throsby - After a Time

This is the second time Holly Throsby has ambushed me at this time of year with a song that seems woven straight from the Australian summertime and all its feelings; last time - late 2011 - it was "What I Thought Of You", from Team, and this time round it's "Mountain", from her earlier-this-year (but I only picked it up recently) release After a Time.

In the past I've felt with Throsby that she can be perhaps too gentle, too quiet, to the extent that there's an ever present risk of losing the thread of her music when listening to a whole album end to end, and while there's a bit of that still here, for whatever reason I've found After a Time holding my attention much more firmly all the way through - it feels more emphatic and direct than Team or On Night, while still entirely delicate, subtle and mood-filled, and it's my favourite that I've heard of hers so far, filled with little details and rises that augment its hushed songs. 

Michael Ondaatje - Running in the Family

Book 1 of 2 in Erandathie's reading course for me before I visit Sri Lanka.

In the acknowledgements, Ondaatje calls it 'not a history but a portrait or "gesture"', which is a good description of the book's tapestry of small pieces, weaving together the author's own voice - a composite of two journeys to Sri Lanka, in 1978 and 1980 - and those of many relatives, friends of the family and others, some of which could only have been nearly wholly, if judiciously, imagined, such as the wonderful extended bit that focuses on his grandmother Lalla through to her death by what was called in an earlier section 'natural causes', in a flood.

The bits that came most to life for me are those in which Ondaatje directly narrates his own experiences returning to the country from Canada, where he's made his home, and the 1920s/30s (jazz age!) vignettes in which his father, mother and associates - and, if I have the timing right, his free-spirited grandmother once liberated by the death of her patriarchal husband - live outrageously in their milieu of cross-country trains (literally: west coast Colombo to eastern Trincomalee features more than once), rubber estates, rest houses, colonial trappings, snakes and enormous flowering gardens. Very romantic.

"All the better to see you with: Fairy tales transformed" (Potter, Melbourne Uni)

Given that it was fairy tale-themed, the question wasn't whether I would like it but, rather, how much, and indeed there is heaps of good stuff in this exhibition at the impressively consistent Potter Museum.

Some pieces jump off quite directly from well known fairy tales, such as Lotte Reiniger's silhouette animations, from the 1920s through to 50s, of tales like Hansel and Gretel and Snow White and Rose Red, Amanda Marburg's plasticine-y oil paintings (though my favourite of them, "Juniper Tree" (2016), calling to mind both Dali and O'Keeffe, is more oblique; I also especially liked her "Hansel and Gretel" (also 2016), facing into the forest), Dina Goldstein's transpositions/juxtapositions, like "Princess Pea" (2009), and that computer game rendition of the Little Red Riding Hood story, "The Path", with which I spent some time a few years ago (referenced here).

The abject and the uncanny also loom large, strongly present in two of the strongest things on offer: Miwa Yanagi's series of black and white photos, many of which depict young women made up to appear very old, and Patricia Piccinini's "Still Life With Stem Cells" (2002), which struck me with a real jolt when I turned a corner and looked into a dark room to see its startlingly lifelike subject sitting there on the carpet, surrounded by typically Piccinini-ish organic-looking globule-y creatures (the way that succession of descriptors that I just rolled out is each not quite precise seems apt, trying to pin down something that, by nature, is elusive). Rare for art to reach out and deliver such an immediate shock - how great! It got better the longer I spent with it too. Also showing: her video "The Gathering" (2007), which I've seen before (in Canberra?), still wonderful.

And for sheer pleasurability, it'd be hard to beat Allison Schulnik's whimsical, poetic and inventive stop-motion clay animation "Mound" (2011), set to the morose tones of Scott Walker's "It's Raining Today" ... which also turns out to be freely available online.

Francine Prose - Reading Like A Writer

The best thing about this book - which is very good overall - is the close attention it pays to words and passages, with generous amounts of quotation from great literature and commentary about how it achieves the effects it does. Chapter headings: close reading; words; sentences; paragraphs; narration; character; dialogue; details; gesture; learning from Chekhov; reading for courage.

Josephine Rowe - How a Moth Becomes a Boat

I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, some of it very short, and found my way to Josephine Rowe via the flash fiction anthology I read a few weeks ago.

The stories collected here are concise, rhythmic, and across the board good; my favourite, I think, is "Leak".

Thor: Ragnarok

I've definitely seen at least two Thor movies, counting The Avengers, and I thought I'd seen another but maybe that's just the trailer I was thinking of. Anyway, I saw the trailer for this one a while back and it made it look terrific, and it is.

Chris Hemsworth is a genial, likeable main character and basically everyone else who shows up here is a gift; Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Hiddleston and Mark Ruffalo are a formidable roll-call of especially enjoyable actors, plus Karl Urban (always good at looking handsome and conflicted), Idris Elba (for the usual maximal charisma), Anthony Hopkins (lending proceedings both camp and gravitas), various NZ accents and one face I recognised from Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and it also has up its sleeve an attention-grabbing turn from an actor I didn't know, Tessa Thompson, and a cameo from Benedict Cumberbatch, who's never unwelcome.

Put them all in a script that's smart, funny and energetic, and directed with an undistracting pizazz and there you go.

The Unthanks - The Songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony & the Johnsons, Live from the Union Chapel (Diversions Vol. 1)

What a delightful, unlooked-for discovery, courtesy of my recent haunting of the local public libraries!

The Unthanks are an English folk group, and here they've covered six of Antony's songs (all but one from I Am A Bird Now, which more and more as time passes feels like a true classic) and nine-ish of Robert Wyatt's (one is very short and an 'excerpt'); the live-in-chamber air works a treat.

The Antony ones are done in relatively spare, piano-based style, which honours their beautiful melodies while allowing the sisters-vocalists' graceful voices to shine. All of the songs come through strongly: "Bird Gerhl", "Man Is The Baby", "You Are My Sister", "For Today I Am A Boy", "Paddy's Gone" (this one was new to me) and "Spiralling". And the Wyatt ones cover more ground, to good effect; the only one whose original I know, "Sea Song", is terrific but the others sparkle too.

Marvellous. I'll definitely be seeking out more of theirs.

Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice

Hard to know how much it's the local connection, but it's been hard to avoid hearing about this one, not least, until recently, via the large billboard on the corner near me that I walk past every day during the periods when I'm walking into town every day (before it: Sleep Well Beast). But what made me buy it was hearing it in the Grace Darling the other day; the guy at the next table from me thought it was Lucinda Williams, specifically on their excellent cover of the still-excellent-in-its-own-right "Fear Is Like A Forest" ((1) Hidden Hands is still my favourite of Cloher's albums; (2) I only learned this year that Cloher and Barnett are partners), and it sure didn't hurt either that they end with a take on the great Belly song "Untogether" - and by the way, how did I never notice before that the opening lyrics of that latter are "I was friendly with this girl who insisted on touching my face"? Anyway, much conversationally melodic tunesing and electric guitar goodness - a nice collab.

Also: it's a record by Courtney and Kurt ... and doesn't sound a million miles away from the 90s in other ways either.

"Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco" & "Akio Makigawa: Spirit and Memory" (NGV Australia)

Del Kathryn Barton

Enormous fun, this. There's serious-minded play going on here: gender (especially the feminine), sexuality and the unconscious get quite a workout, and there's heaps going on visually yet it all lands with a kapow, over and over.

Probably the most striking, and definitely my favourite, are the big polymer paint and pen works, including the one that gives the exhibition its name, the five-breasted "of pink planets" (2014), and the spectacular five-panel "sing blood-wings sing" series (2017).

But I also enjoyed the pen drawings, with small sections coloured, which are much more overt in grappling with sex and identity, and the intense 15 minute video piece, "Red", featuring mothers, fathers, death, life, redback spiders, heavy metal imagery, acid trip imagery, and a reminder (as if such were even needed) that Cate Blanchett is just some kind of wonderful.

* * *

Akio Makigawa

Quite the contrast to DKB but also excellent, this selection of sculptures is installed across the foyer and stair spaces of all three levels of the gallery. I'm often drawn to this kind of Zen-like stuff (another e.g.: Lee Ufan) and this is really good. Above: "Time keeper" (1987), "Untitled" (1981). Below: "Red", "Circle of Water III" (1999).

Haim - Something to Tell You

There are some straight-up pop albums that, while they're kind of immediate, actually take quite a few listens to really show themselves, and Something to Tell You has turned out to be one of those. I wonder, are guitar-based outfits more prone to that effect? Anyway, obviously I persevered through the initial 'oh, this is just kind of okay' listens because I'm already a fan and just as well because there's plenty of fizz and song-y muscle across the record, especially at the top and tail. First track "Want You Back" was that journey in microcosm, from initially thinking it was just nice enough but forgettable, to really worming its way in - and same with plenty of the others, including the several that come straight after it ("Nothing's Wrong", "Little of Your Love", "Ready for You" and the title track). I do especially like "Found It In Silence" too, with its massed strings and emphatic percussion.

Borg McEnroe

Pivots on the 1980 Wimbledon final; it added to the drama for me that I didn't know who was going to win (and in retrospect, I'm glad they picked '80 instead of '81).

A very good tennis film, making some interesting choices in how it introduces both Borg and McEnroe, and I liked the intense focus on their interiority, Borg in particular, though the film doesn't quite escape the 'fire and ice' / 'rebel and gentlemen' / 'America and Europe' cliches (although kudos for casting Shia LaBeouf as basically the ultimate American brat - and to him for turning in a strong performance in the role).

It brought to mind DFW's essays, and also - really only because of the tennis connection - Battle of the Sexes.

(w/ Erandathie)

Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 seasons 1 & 2

Rewatched for distraction at intervals over last few weeks. Again an utter delight of a sitcom, stiletto sharp at times - almost exclusively when aimed at the vacuousness of Chloe's and James' socialite/celebrity lifestyles - but basically candy-centred, in its treatment of June, NYC and everything else. Also, a solid set of supporting characters, both as written and performed: Mark (Eric Andre), Luther, Eli and Robin. Not to mention, whip-smart in an unobtrusive way, and deathly funny usually at least once per episode. (last time)

The Testament of Mary (Malthouse)

A powerful, one-woman - Pamela Rabe - show, giving voice to Mary.

(w/ Hayley)

Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

Every time I try to pin it down, it slips away. Even what its effect is is slippery, never mind how it achieves it - or, for that matter, why, or what the broader picture is that it's painting. But Hot Milk is powerful - sinuous, sulky, skating along on the surface, riven by subterranean forces. Cerebral and sensual. Slipping subtly unstuck through time, infused with the places it traverses, all significant - beachside southern Spain where medusa jellyfish sting mercilessly, a return to the father in Athens, Greece. Disquieting, at times menacing, at other times ecstatic, and bearing a wavering but sharp relation to the quotidian. Encounters, repetitions. Sofia and Rose, Dr Gomez and Nurse Sunshine (that would be Julieta Gomez), Ingrid, Juan and Matthew, Christos and Alexandra. Maybe its most signal achievement is how strongly it works on the level of representation and figuration while steeping itself in layer upon layer of symbolism, especially associated with the feminine (medusas, snakes, the breast-like formation of Dr Gomez's clinic, and many more). Any which way, it's quite something.

Broken Social Scene - Hug of Thunder

Broken Social Scene! Here's a blast from the past. They were big back when pitchfork was huge - or, at least, when it was huge in my parts - but never completely took hold for me, "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" aside; I'd completely forgotten but I even saw them play live, at a St Jeromes Laneway Festival back when the festivals were actually in the laneway.

Still, they and their music have had a way of rippling forward, directly and via their sprawling set of members, and I knew they were still making music at longish intervals, so I was receptive when the Feist-vocalled title track (and lead single I think), "Hug of Thunder", came around all joyously building indie-epic, and just as well, because the album is just terrific. There's crash and clatter, thunder and thump and skidding pop shimmer; I tend to lean towards the relatively more pop end of their spectrum, like "Protest Song" and "Gonna Get Better" (which makes me think of Mary Margaret O'Hara's deathless "Body's in Trouble"), but it's all good here.

Loving Vincent

Worked for me on the technical aspect - the animated paintings - but less so on the story-telling side, which tended heavily towards the episodic. Best watched as an appreciation of Van Gogh's art rather than as a conventional movie per se.

(w/ Erandathie)

Clueless

Somehow I'd never watched this one before, despite its position in the 90s pantheon. And it was pretty fun! (If somewhat dated, sometimes in ways that worked to its advantage, sometimes not so much.)

"Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images" & "Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow" (GOMA, Brisbane)

Richter is one of those artists whose work I've discovered - and, over time, come to like a lot - pretty much entirely through art gallery happenstance, starting with a chance encounter at the Albertina in Vienna several years ago, then a couple of years later being struck by a painting called "Meadowland" at a show in Perth built on MoMA pieces, and then last year's coming across a version of his luminous "Betty" (in the red gown) at Benesse House in Naoshima).

This exhibition drew the threads together for me, highlighting both the various modes that he works in - notably the blurry, often photograph-derived representational paintings, the over-painted photos, and the generally large format abstract pieces, and the concerns that tie them all together (including the relationships between painting, photography, paint, images, representation and perception). "Meadowland" was here, as was what I think was another print of the same "Betty" piece (in characteristic fashion, a print of a painting that instead had been based on a photograph); and I really noticed how lively the large abstracts - mostly done by squeegee - are up close. Also worthwhile were the many boards of small photographs collected as 'Atlas', which gave a real insight into Richter's work and process. All up, a terrific exhibition.

I wasn't so much in the mood for Kusama, so it was a somewhat dutiful wander through the selection on offer here, which nonetheless couldn't help but impress just a little bit, even if for no other reason than her sheer vigour and prolificness.

(w/ trang)

"Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium" & "Pat Brassington: The Body Electric" (Art Gallery of NSW)

The Mapplethorpe was a bit of an overview exhibition. Lots to digest, even though through time and familiarity - and no doubt the careful artistry of the work itself - his photos have come to register primarily on an aesthetic and iconic level rather than more deeply (and I didn't have time on this visit to penetrate). Notable: the ones of his young artist peer types including a young Philip Glass, and the flowers.

While the Pat Brassington was a selection spanning from the 90s through to now, leaning a bit towards the last few years, showing off her facility with the uncanny very well.

Atlantis (Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney)

By happy coincidence, this was playing at Belvoir on the night I was in Sydney - the latest in Lally Katz's string of more or less (one assumes) autobiographically-touched plays, and indeed calling back explicitly to the events chronicled in Stories I Want to Tell You in Person a few years back (cursed vagina, psychic cure and all). It was very enjoyable - truthful and sincere, and also knowingly artificial and theatrical, in a way that resonated. And, the panther made me think of Bobcat as well as of the other spirit-type animals that recur throughout Katz's oeuvre.

(w/ Hayley)

Firefly, Serenity & associated graphic novels

Fun revisiting the tv series and film, and a reminder of what great tv it was - fast paced, adept with the high concept, good on characters, and with a dab hand for manufacturing an iconic moment/line or few. The graphic novels - some of them only single-issue comics or slightly longer, and all apparently 'canon' (and scripted by or with heavy involvement from Joss Whedon), collected as "Those Left Behind", "Better Days and other stories", "The Shepherd's Tale" and "Leaves on the Wind" - are a mixed bag, though I guess it's inevitable that something would be lost in translation.

(previously)

"Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean" (MCA, Sydney)

Smallish but quite wonderful; even allowing that I have a weakness for stuff that combines video, projection, lights and installation like this, I reckon it's pretty definitely the best contemporary show I've seen this year.

My favourites were probably the two two-channel video projections that alternated near the start of the exhibition, "Ever Is Over All" (1997), in which a woman joyously smashes car windows with a large, stemmed flower, and "Sip My Ocean" (1996), in which the screens shows a series of mirrored oceanic vignettes, many in close-up and with plenty of ugly to go with the dreamy and pretty, to the strains of a warped version of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" (which shazam tells me is called "I'm A Victim Of This Song"). Both of them, and especially "Ever Is Over All", reminded me of how powerful a poetic sensibility can be in a work that's otherwise heading in the direction of abstraction.

Also delightful, and packing a more immediate visceral-experiential punch, were "Administrating Eternity" (2011), involving a dozen or so hanging net curtains with various looping projections playing and diffusing across them, and "Pixelwald Motherboard" ("Pixel Forest Mutterplatte") (2016), which made me think of Christmas lights, then stars, then ice, then dreams, and which the exhibition notes say imagines a television screen exploding into a room.

And nearly at the end there was "Your Room Opposite the Opera", apparently collecting 14 individual works from 1994 to 2017, and setting them within a decorated 'apartment' in which we were invited to sit in the chairs and sofas, lie in the bed (onto which projections were also being cast - stars and people flying), and sit at the desk to add some lines of our own poetry ... including one tiny work, about the size of a 20 cent coin, visible through a hole cut in the carpet underfoot.

As an aside, this was the latest in a run of very good experiences with the MCA: Olafur Eliasson (Feb '10), Anish Kapoor (Feb '13), Tabaimo (Aug '14).

J D Salinger - Nine Stories

I really did not like The Catcher in the Rye for reasons that are now lost in the mists of personal antiquity, so it was a tremendous and pleasant surprise to discover how strong these nine stories are, all dating from the late 40s and early 50s. I haven't been able to work out exactly why I like them - there's just something about that that compels, something in the odd structures and unusual sentence rhythms and voices that run through them.

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esme - With Love and Squalor" (both involving a returned soldier's interaction with a child, but to very different results) are the two that best combine substance and style, and "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" has also lingered (it's taken me several weeks to work through the stories, interspersed with other reading). There are a few that are maybe just a bit too cute in their design; "Down at the Dinghy" is one of these but works anyway with its opening set-up and ending reveal (partly because Boo Boo is such a lively character), but "The Laughing Man" and "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" (despite its double twist in relation to the grey-haired man and Joanie) don't. And there is also the art-pastiche "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" which has plenty of fun with its resolutely self-absorbed precocious teen narrator.

Bad Genius

Wrings plenty of excitement from the escalating series of schemes executed by the titular brilliant student who finds herself helping her less intellectually gifted classmates to cheat on their exams (who are able to pay), culminating in making texting thrilling!

For most of the film I wasn't sure how I was supposed to feel, or how I actually felt, about Lynn - she's set up as the protagonist so naturally you root for her, but cheating is obviously bad, but then again there are suggestions that the deck of Thai society is so stacked against those, like Lynn, not born into wealth and privilege that maybe it's defensible to take financial advantage of her intellectual gifts? - and the film resolves that aspect interestingly, though not especially satisfyingly (particularly with the way things turn out for Bank, the other scholarship student at the school, who is drawn into the scheme).

Anyway, it's scripted and directed with some flair, including a pop verve and musical sensibility that adds a fair bit, and while the performances from the principals - Lynn and Bank, and rich kids Grace and Pat - are nothing extraordinary, they're charismatic enough to carry their (well-written) characters through. In the sweet spot, as I'd hoped, of being all of entertaining, something a bit different, and even a bit thought-provoking.

Tegan and Sara - Sainthood

Very delightful. From 2009. Especially some of the more bubbly pop ones, like "The Cure" and "Alligator".

Jessie Ware - Glasshouse

Boy, Jessie Ware just keeps on putting one good record out after another. This one's almost uniformly ballads, not that I'm one to complain about that, and maybe just a tiny bit too evenly mellow but that's a minor quibble in the context of Glasshouse's overall high quality. Highlights: "Your Domino", "Selfish Love" (bossa nova!), "First Time", "Hearts" (the most ballad-y of the ballads), "Slow Me Down", "Finish What We Started" (complete with new wave good vibes).

(Devotion; Tough Love)

Joy Williams - Ninety-Nine Stories of God

Sometimes he (He) appears directly:

69

The Lord was in line at the pharmacy counter waiting to get His shingles shot.

When His turn came, the pharmacist didn't want to give it to Him.

This is not right, the pharmacist said.

In what way? the Lord inquired.

In so many ways, the pharmacist said. I scarcely know where to begin.

Just give it to him, a woman behind the Lord said. My ice cream's melting.

It only works 60 to 70 percent of the time anyway, the pharmacist said.

Do you want to ask me some questions? the Lord said.

You're not afraid of shingles, are you? It's not so bad.

I am not afraid, the Lord said.

Just give Him the shot for Pete's sake, the woman said.

Have you ever had chicken pox?

Of course, the Lord said.

How did you hear about us? the pharmacist said.

INOCULUM

Sometimes by reference or association:

25

Churches have pews, and when the congregation falters they have too many pews. They end up in the kindergartens and the music rooms and the covered walkways. They seem to multiply. Fine old oak uncomfortable pews.

Then they start showing up in bars and finished basements and in mudrooms where people take off their boots and shoes.

There was a little girl once in a birthday bounce house that wasn't tied down properly. A freak gust of wind picked it up and sailed it three backyards over, where it killed a beagle eating his supper.

Nothing happened to the little girl. She was a funny kid anyway. She never showed emotion about anything. But people felt terrible about the dog.

The young couple whose dog it had been had a pew in their kitchen, but they got rid of it. They replaced it with a bar made from the rear of a '64 Airstream Globetrotter. It became apparent pretty early on that it wasn't an actual rear of a Globetrotter but a copy. The neighbors who had felt so sorry for them began thinking they were frivolous and, even more, couldn't be trusted.

VERACITY

And sometimes only in the most oblique of glimpses (most of my favourites are these):

38

The child wanted to name the rabbit Actually, and could not be dissuaded from this.

It was the first time one of our pets was named after an adverb.

It made us uncomfortable. We thought it to be bad luck.

But no ill befell any of us nor did any ill befall the people who visited our home.

Everything proceeded beautifully, in fact, until Actually died.

ACTUALLY

At once seemingly transparent and puzzlingly oblique, Ninety-Nine Stories of God (as Kim pointed out today, spotting me sitting on a bench re-reading it, a title that sticks out like a sore thumb) is something different. The effect is a bit cumulative, but even still, at its best it's remarkable in the way it offers 'that glimpse of truth', though inevitably some of the 99 fall considerably short. Incidentally, it's been a good companion to Lydia Davis's collected stories, which I've also been working through lately.

Jeff VanderMeer - Annihilation

In which everything is very unstable. Mission accomplished. Heard about this one a while ago and was prompted to read it now by imminence of the film adaptation (which boasts a very intriguing trailer).

Benjamin Law - "Moral Panic 101: Equality, Acceptance and the Safe Schools Scandal" (Quarterly Essay 67)

A good, clear-headed read. The biggest things I took out of it were the enormous role played by The Australian and the ACL in generating alarm and opposition re: Safe Schools, and the way the program acted as a lightning rod for much broader social concerns about gender, sexuality and children's safety, development and agency.

As an aside, even though I'm only a sporadic reader, it's pretty great that the Quarterly Essays have become such an established part of the landscape. While obviously tilted towards my own particular interests, as well as towards the periods when I was paying particular attention, the ones I've read go:

• Raimond Gaita on truth, morality and politics (#16, 2004) - one of the few periodicals to have survived my increasingly swingeing bookshelf culls
• Clive Hamilton on the decline (or, in his diagnosis, death) of social democracy (#21, 2006)
• Inga Clendinnen on the history wars and the relationship between history and fiction (#23, 2006)
• Peter Hartcher on how to win the 2007 election, written in early '07 (#25, 2007)
• Annabel Crabb on Malcolm Turnbull, written when he was opposition leader (#34, 2009)
• Laura Tingle on public expectations of government (#46, 2012)
• Laura Tingle (again) on the loss of institutional memory and resultant diminishment in good government (#60, 2015) - the other QE that I've held on to

Final Portrait

All in all, a bit of a nothing film, although it slightly grew on me towards the end as I realised that it was a genuine effort at depicting the creative process, its struggles and its stakes; Geoffrey Rush the main attraction, Armie Hammer always enjoyable, Sylvie Testud and Clemence Poesy providing ornamental (but well played) Frenchness.

(w/ Erandathie)

Kader Attia (ACCA)

Quite liked this, including the thread of trauma that runs through the survey of Attia's work. I didn't get a super strong sense of voice (or vision) from the works as a whole though.

(w/ Hayley)

Lilli Carré - Heads or Tails

'Stories by Lilli Carré,' it says on the cover, and that's what these are, ranging from very short to substantial and with an impressive diversity of illustration styles. And they're marvellous - precisely, slippingly poetic, and never more so than in the longest story in the book, "The Carnival", which is one of my favourite things I've read in a long time, in this or any other form.

Feist - Pleasure

Whatever else it is, Pleasure is strikingly personal, in the sense that it feels every inch like an expression of some part of Leslie Feist without regard to saleability or expectation. We know she can write wonderfully warm melodies (not to mention bittersweet ones) and a hell of a chorus when she wants to - never more in evidence than on last album Metals - but on this outing she sticks almost exclusively to a moody, stretched out, slow-burn rockishness that I would enjoy more if it more frequently caught really alight, but nonetheless, has a lot going on.

Arcade Fire - Everything Now

It was bound to happen eventually and now it has: the Arcade Fire have made a bad album. Funeral has stayed great, Neon Bible was a pleasant surprise of a second album, and then I went into each of The Suburbs and Reflektor expecting them to be really not good only to discover in succession that actually they were each excellent, but Everything Now, unfortunately, lands with a thud.

Lots of songs that seem like they're trying to be tight and funky but are actually just dull, only two ("Creature Comfort" and "Electric Blue") that I'd count on the positive side of the ledger (also, "Put Your Money On Me" would maybe beat break-even if it didn't go on for so long), and oh I guess "We Don't Deserve Love" is quite nice too but by the time we reach it at album's end, it's too late. And a first for this band: in "Good God Damn", a song that makes me cringe a bit in embarrassment. 

Eilen Jewell - Down Hearted Blues

How knowing is the seeming tautology in the album's title? Fairly knowing I think, which doesn't detract from the sincerity with which Jewell tackles the titular song, nor any of the other of the twelve all somewhat lesser known blues songs included here (the only one I knew before was "Nothing in Rambling" courtesy of Lucinda Williams' version).

Anyhow, Down Hearted Blues has been creeping up on me a bit. On initial listens it seemed fine enough, but maybe a bit too unadornedly monochrome, with quite a lot of these takes quite clean vocals+electric guitar+sparing drums, without the gleeful variation and dynamism that's created many of the highlights of Jewell's previous records - but it's popped a bit more on the last couple of spins, so perhaps one of those that I need to live with some more...

(Sea of Tears, Queen of the Minor Key, Live at the Narrows, Sundown Over Ghost Town).

Haruki Murakami - Men Without Women

I'm not sure if it might be that I've been away from Murakami for a little while and so I've forgotten a touch what he's like, or perhaps that I've so thoroughly internalised his world that it seems normal, or maybe that there actually has been a discernible shift in his style, but overall Men Without Women, like his most recent novel Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, seemed to me to tend considerably more realistic than has been typical for him in the past.

I'm pretty sure there's only one story, "Samsa in Love", which is out and out fantastic, and it's the weakest; having said that, the one with the strongest sense of the uncanny, "Kino", is by a fair margin the best, and it may not be a coincidence that (apart from the fable-like "Samsa") it's also the most resolved of the seven collected here, albeit with resolution being a somewhat relative term as always when it comes to Murakami.

Bill Willingham and Shawn McManus - Thessaly: Witch for Hire

Lunchtime reading today. Thessaly was always one of my favourite minor characters in Sandman, and this four-issue series takes a lighter road with her and is easy to read, though its resolution turns on an all too predictable language thing (guessable as soon as the oracle tells her that nothing and no one can stop that chaotic creature that's coming for her).

"Rene Magritte: The Revealing Image - Photos and Films" (Latrobe Regional Gallery)

A few photos of Magritte and his family, and more taken by Magritte himself spanning from around his thirties (in the 1930s) onwards, the subjects being some combinations of himself, his wife Georgette, his friends, and one or two family members including his brother Paul, as well as some short 'home video' type movie recordings that he 'scripted' and made in similar vein, including many stagings of scenarios and images that also made their way into his paintings. Nothing life-changing, but the playfulness of it all, not to mention the wholehearted willingness of those close to him to participate in the clowning, is a good reminder that, for all the seriousness and perfectionism apparent in his paintings, there is a strong playful stream of humour running through his work and ideas too.

(w/ trang - company needed for trip out to Morwell)

Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I read this on a recommendation, and it was a good one. Plenty of reinforcements and some new ways of looking at things; a good companion to the Colum McCann one. A resonant extract:

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it.

And a little summary laundry list of some of Lamott's 'things she knows about writing': Short assignments, shitty first drafts, one-inch picture frames, Polaroids, messes, mistakes, partners, where 'Polaroids' is shorthand for the way that a piece slowly develops as you work on it, its true subject maybe only gradually revealing itself as something very different than where you started with your attention.

Yerma (National Theatre live - Young Vic)

This was exceptional - the first of these NT 'live' screenings that has really made me wish I was there in person. A Simon Stone re-telling - and you can really see his distinctive stamp on it - of a Federico Garcia Lorca play starring Billie Piper and Brendan Cowell, it's gripping from the get go and intensely dramatic in every sense, feeling both universal and symbolic, and contemporary and filled with real people and real actions. "Barren", and of course there's blood by the end.

(w/ Cass)

"Tree of Codes" (Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson & Jamie xx)

It was Olafur Eliasson's involvement that caught my attention and Jamie xx's on top of it that made this a must-see and both of their work comes through very clearly and spectacularly in this context. And because I'm basically ignorant when it comes to dance, contemporary or otherwise, Wayne McGregor's name didn't mean anything to me (I gather he is big), but the dancing, both as choreographed and performed by dancers from McGregor's company and the Paris Opera Ballet (whose collaboration with Alex Prager, incidentally, has brought me some pleasure at intervals over the past few months) is terrific, in part because of all the ways in which it's precisely imprecise, unfluid and out of sync, creating all kinds of interesting effects in conjunction with the mirrors in Eliasson's staging.

So I thought "Tree of Codes" was great even though somehow I struggled to stay 'in' it for the whole time - and it's relatively brief, at only a bit over an hour, at that. Maybe it was just one of those things, compounded by the somewhat limited visibility from our (very close to the stage) seats. But, notwithstanding, overall it was definitely something, with moments that were really sublime - most frequently when there were only a limited number of dancers on stage, two or three or four - and a general sense of joy.

Incidentally, made me think a little bit of that Knife opera "Tomorrow, in a year", also from the Melbourne Festival a few years back - but much more successful (and more focused on the dance aspect).

(w/ trang and Meribah)

Sia - We Are Born

There could be no better sign for a pop record than to have you actually smiling within its first few seconds on a first listen, but that's what the kick-off to "The Fight" did for me. And the album charges on from there, with Sia's sidelong hook prowess and range on full display across its first half, through "Clap Your Hands" (maybe the leanest and most straight ahead of them), "Stop Trying", "You've Changed" (with its repeated expectation upending pause and swoop on '... for the better'), "Be Good To Me" and "Bring Night". It drops off from there, but still.

(1000 Forms of Fear; This Is Acting)

David Bowie - Station to Station

Well, this one is excellent! And excellently enigmatic. Six long songs which defy explanation but grab hold tight.

Lorde - Melodrama

Very good. Space, rhythm and dynamics, with an array of interesting hooks and enough melody to tie it all together.

"The Lifted Brow mixtape"

Well this is fun - The Lifted Brow made a mixtape. My favourites are all basically lo-fi, could-be-bedsit indie-pop - Jade Imagine's "Esteem", Milk Teddy's "Too Old To Cry" and Waterfall Person's "I Really Like This" - plus the impressively smooth and soulful "Sex Appeal" by Pillow Pro, which reminds me of All Saints (in a good way obviously) and Jessie Ware.

Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston

Various exhibitions when I happened to visit, including one on Frederick Strange, a colonial painter of Launceston (I liked the watercolours more, but it was the oil paintings that drew me more deeply into imagining what it would actually have been like to see and live in 19th century Tasmania), and 'Art Quilt Australia 2017', the main room of which I walked straight through on first pass, so uninterested was I, but on a more careful look, lots of them proved worth the closer examination, with the best being genuinely painterly.

Below: Alison Withers, "Cassidy's gap"; Jill Rumble, "Telling secrets III"; Louise Wells, "Dusk"; Cherry Johnston, "Circles of life"; Brenda Gael Smith, "Flourish".

 

 

 

Peter Høeg - Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow

It's quite something how many little lines, images and scenes had stayed with me from when I previously read this, nearly a decade ago - a testament to the sharpness of Høeg's writing and his ability to find unusual (and evidently memorable) angles on things.

The main reason I went back and re-read it was the first person present tense voice in which it's written, and I must say that while the voice contributes a lot to its distinctiveness, this time round I'm not sure what purpose is served by the use of the present tense in particular; also interesting is the way that the narrative jumps around in time quite a bit, and that Peter often speaks in the present tense.

Other things: extensive use of simile; often funny (Smilla Jaspersen really is a wonderful creation); frequent misdirects (e.g. Smilla internally monologues in one direction and then turns around and says that what's going on with her is its exact opposite) - the last of which are frequently the entry points into a scene, serving treble purpose as backstory-delivery, characterisation and avoiding jumping straight in with either the bluntness of action or the filler-ness of scene description. Also, it's still a great read, pacy, atmospheric, philosophical and human.

"The Museum of Everything" & the collection (MONA)

There's something about MONA - my relationship with the museum is disproportionate to only having visited twice before (admittedly, both extended visits), in 2011 and 2014, and so this trip came with plenty of existing associations, both general and in relation to individual works.

The current exhibition, "The Museum of Everything", is a 'takeover' by the travelling museum of the same name, installing an array of work by artists who are self-taught and outside the traditional art-making system (many with some kind of disability or mental illness); a roomful of Henry Darger in the middle but much, much else too. Not a field ('style' doesn't feel quite right) that has ever much appealed to me, but it does throw up some unusual modes of expressing perspectives and personal truths, as well as some interesting through-lines to the art canon.

In the first of those categories, ones that struck me included Marcel Storr's fantastically detailed cathedrals, William Mortensen's 1920s witchcraft photos and Ionel Talpazan's 'self-powered UFOs'.

And in the second category, notable ones were Hilma af Klint's theosophical watercolours from the 1930s, and Joseph Yoakum's mountain ranges and Anna Zemankova's 'interior botanies' (both from the 1960s).

Also very pleasing: the anonymous 'devil drawings' from early in the 19th century and Louis DeMarco's 'personal aphorisms'.

The presentation of that exhibition is quite conventional in some ways, going room by room according to loose theme - an interesting but, I think, effective choice to present and make some sense of a collection of pieces that (1) don't conform to any particular stylistic patterns or movements and (2) comprise the exhibition's argument for the value or interest of works created by outsiders.

* * *

And then there was the general collection, much of which I'd seen on previous visits, meaning that some of the most striking have taken on a difference valence through familiarity and time, as well as the space itself now being considerably less overwhelming, and either I've just gotten used to it or it actually has veered just a touch more conventional over the years. Anyhow, of note:

• "Kryptos" (Brigita Ozolins) was the one that I most wanted to revisit. It feels like the externalisation of something - some chamber - within myself. Still powerful.
• I visited the 'death chamber' for the first time, having been put off by the queues on previous occasions. Mummy and 'mummy' in a darkened, water-filled chamber through which one moves via a series of steps, a disquieting print on one wall that turns out to be a Serrano. It didn't move me, even though I got to go in alone.
• Took a beanbag for a few songs' worth of Candice Breitz's "Queen (A Portrait of Madonna)". Good for the soul.
• There were several Pat Brassington photos that I don't think were there before - good.
• Another new one: Patrick Hall's "Lure", its spectral faces projected onto fishing lures and morbid accompanying text, is terrific.
• The untitled Jannis Kounellis with the goldfish is sharp.
• Always good to see Nolan in this context, including the monumental "Snake".